An electrifying novel about illness, displacement, and what holds us together, by the author of Seeing Red Ella is an astrophysicist struggling with her doctoral thesis in the “country of the present” but she is from the “country of the past,” a ...

Most of NUBClub couldn't get through Meruane's novel about illness and family dynamics. The text is just so labored. Something about the style and the detailed descriptions of sickness and malaise makes the novel very heavy and hard to read, and most of us just gave up. The two of us who finished it were not more impressed. Unfortunately, the story was just very slow and small for all the time spent describing the issues and trauma of the characters. The situation of the novel was fine. The story of the familial conflicts, both in the marriage and in the parent-child relationships, were interesting, but the metaphor of illness just became turgid and ultimately the central conflict of whether the daughter will reveal her secret can't carry the whole novel. This one is just a fail for us.