An intimate connection to a whole family's struggle
5 stars
Poetic descriptions usually put me off in a novel because the act puts importance on something that usually doesn't need it. It pulls me out of the story. Strong Washburn uses poetics instead to show the inner feelings of the character. And she does it well. You viscerally feel the turmoil or the disgust or the peace. It totally worked for me.
This was done in a magical-realism type of plot (though the grittiness is not like the wispy distance of the genre at all), so the dream-like connections to the earth had the same feeling as the prose.
And the final speech was brutally beautiful. I cried.
