It’s not that Katie’s life is terrible, but she just can’t seem to do things right—to move through the world with the ease that everyone else does. Everyone, including her boyfriend James, who is sweet enough to take a break from work to whisk Katie away to his family’s seaside house. Joining them is Silver, a precious cat that James found when he was younger, who Katie becomes obsessed with at the cost of her fragile facade of normalcy.
This is the kind of book where you have to save some of the lines so that you can share them with your therapist, because the author has somehow put a feeling you’ve had into words better than you can. It’s relatable in that weird, literary way where you don’t have much meaningfully in common with the protagonist and probably don’t even particularly like them, but you connect to their humanity and realism.
I think what the author really nails is that passive dread of “I’m not responding correctly to this situation” and the weirdness of being aware of that while also not knowing how to fix it. There are moment where you know what Katie is doing is unusual or wrong and she knows it too, and both you and her know she’s going to keep doing it. Silver becomes kind of an interesting device because Katie clearly envies the complete lack of expectations that people project on to Silver. Katie’s relationship with her mother is also kind of an interesting undercurrent that helps explain the extent of her detachment and difficulty with relationships.
That being said, the book doesn’t really go anywhere, which is fairly standard for this genre but tends to make things forgettable for me. I think it would have been much more of a standout if Yu had really committed to the weirdness. It’s mentioned that Katie eats some of Silver’s food and gets excited by the idea that James sees her as a pet, and I think that could have been taken in a much more disturbing and more interesting direction.
It’s a nice, quick read if you want something literary to break up your regular reading, just not a standout for me.
Thank you to Stacey Yu and Random House for this ARC in exchange for my full, honest review!
Happy reading!
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