Review by Booklist Review
Cassie was born with her abdomen tied in a knot. She has this twisted middle in common with her mother and grandmother, the trio a medical enigma. Growing up, Cassie works on the family farm harvesting from the meat quarry (a giant canyon with walls of nondescript flesh), but her singular focus is becoming untied. She struggles to make friends and find love, and even when she does, everything depends on her ability to hide her freakish knot. Cassie enters adulthood and flies the nest, finding an apartment in the big city and taking a job as a typist. Her search for normalcy continues. Eventually, Cassie meets a doctor who is able to surgically remove the knot, and she believes her liberation is nigh. She is met with grave disappointment, however, when she discovers that lovers find her surgical scars disturbing, too, and that becoming untied does not protect her from loss or grief. Penned in succinct, poetic prose, Etter's surreal debut is exactly as grotesque and horrifying as young adulthood.--Courtney Eathorne Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in a world that is an uncanny twin of the real, Etter's ultrastylized and surreal debut casts a reflection that, like a carnival mirror, points aptly, if heavy-handedly, at humanity's defects. Narrator Cassie is born with her stomach twisted into a knot , and her coiled figure is one of the many tensions that spring the novel's action and lyricism. Cassie is bullied at school, makes a friend in Sophia (who is also bullied), and aches while looking at the beauty magazines collected by her image-obsessed, similarly knotted mother. Cassie's solipsism is as extreme as her paradoxical universe: her father harvests protein from a "red, fleshy canyon," called the Meat Quarry, her mother feeds her rocks as diet-food. Cassie is raped by a boy named Jarred she had developed a crush on, and after high school, she moves to a city. There, she gets a dull office job, drinks alone in bars, and is sometimes successful in her attempts to sleep with strangers, all while contending with loneliness and the separation she feels from the world around her. Etter's coming-of-age story builds intrigue as it morphs into a portrait of a young woman adrift, but the narrative is often obscured by Cassie's fragmented, lyrical voice, resulting in an uneven debut. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A girl born with an unusual disfigurement navigates the loneliness and trauma caused by her physical difference in this surreal first novel.Cassie comes from a long line of women born with a knotted torso. These knots aren't small bulges, like a knotted muscle. "Picture," Cassie tells us, "three women with their torsos twisted like thick pieces of rope with a single hitch in the center." At school, Cassie is tormented by her classmates; her only friend, Sophia, runs hot and cold with her affections, and Cassie's crush, Jarred, finds her both attractive and repulsive. At home, things are not much better. Each day Cassie's dad and brother go off to the nearby Meat Quarry, tearing raw meat from vast cavern walls and selling it at the market when demand is strong. Cassie's mother is reaching the age when her knot begins to cause her severe physical pain; she turns her ferocious attention on Cassie's appearance, encouraging her daughter to slim down by packing her rocks for lunch. When an act of violence shatters whatever uneasy peace Cassie has made with her own body, she must spend the rest of her life dealing with the dark aftermath. Etter, who has one previous collection of short fiction (Tongue Party, 2011), structures this book in fragments, alternating the story of Cassie's physical struggles with sections called "Vision," in which Cassie imagines an alternate life for herself. The surreality highlights the unbearably visceral way Cassie sees the world, whether she's helping her father harvest meat with her bare hands from the "red wetness" of the quarry, wandering through fields of throats, or having electric eels applied to her abdomen in the futile hope of becoming normal.A relentlessly original look at what it means to exist in a female body. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
