How High We Go in the Dark

el dang (e)k Sequoia Nagamatsu(r)en How High We Go in the Dark liburuaren kritika egin du

How High We Go in the Dark

4 izar

A very emotional and structurally interesting book - somewhere between a set of short stories and a set of chapters with very varied styles and points of view.

I loved the ways the stories were connected to each other, and the best of them were absolutely heartrending pictures of grief, fear, and mourning. Many of them did live on in my mind for some time afterwards. But towards the end I felt like some of the broader attempts to pull it all together in one arc didn't quite land for me.

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Shauna (e)k Sequoia Nagamatsu(r)en How High We Go in the Dark liburuaren kritika egin du

A hard but beautiful read

5 izar

If I had known ahead of time what the structure and focus of this book was, I probably wouldn't have read it. That would have been my loss.

"How High We Go In the Dark" is a series of interconnected short stories set in the same world. This is not my favorite structural style: I prefer to follow a set of characters from beginning to end. Nagamatsu, though, has a rare talent for sketching out characters you can quickly attach to. I felt sorrowful every time I reached the end of a chapter and had to say goodbye.

In this way, the structure was a good fit for the world itself, and the story the author wanted to tell: one focused on death, loss, and how it transforms us. With some frequency, leaving a character at the end of their chapter meant watching them die.

This is one the most …

If I had known ahead of time what the structure and focus of this book was, I probably wouldn't have read it. That would have been my loss.

"How High We Go In the Dark" is a series of interconnected short stories set in the same world. This is not my favorite structural style: I prefer to follow a set of characters from beginning to end. Nagamatsu, though, has a rare talent for sketching out characters you can quickly attach to. I felt sorrowful every time I reached the end of a chapter and had to say goodbye.

In this way, the structure was a good fit for the world itself, and the story the author wanted to tell: one focused on death, loss, and how it transforms us. With some frequency, leaving a character at the end of their chapter meant watching them die.

This is one the most depressing novels I've ever read, but it also deeply creative, empathetic, hopeful, and beautiful. It was satisfying seeing the strands from earlier chapters weave their way through the later ones. In a lesser writer's hands, this novel would be unbearable, but in Nagamatsu's, it becomes something hard to bear, yet worth bearing.

Jim Brown (e)k Sequoia Nagamatsu(r)en How High We Go in the Dark liburuaren kritika egin du

Pandemic novel about generational strife

Baloraziorik ez

I didn't expect this pandemic/space travel novel to be so much about children who are disappointing their parents.

This felt more like an interconnected collection of short stories in the same world than a novel. In that sense, it was similar to Rion Amilcar Scott's The World Doesn't Require you.

anaulin@bookwyrm.social

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