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It took me a while to get into this story but I'm glad I stuck with it. If you like stories with a lot of battles between heroes and monster villains, this is your book. While I enjoy a superhero show as much as the next person, reading fight scenes in a novel is not to my taste. As the story unfolds, the social commentary ramps up. Would be especially relevant to New Yorkers who are familiar with the personalities of the city's boroughs. As an outsider, I understood enough to see where the story was headed but I'm sure it offers more to New York inhabitants. I read this book via audiobook and enjoyed the voicing and dramatization.

I liked the use of a strong narrative voice in this book, and that the story is narrated through the eyes of one of the side characters. The world inhabited by the characters is dangerous and difficult and I really got a sense of it. I did find the language (racism, misogyny, fatphobia, etc) difficult to deal with. I didn't like the protagonist, Oscar, a young man with Incel/stalker tendencies, and I had a hard time empathizing with him. This isn't always necessary in order to enjoy a novel but, in this case, I thought my ambivalence toward him lessened the effect of the conclusion. Overall, I'm glad to have read this story. I may go through it at a later date and read through the footnotes which I left out as they slowed the pace of the story.

Wonderful. Winterson claims that the mind can't tell the difference between the past and future. Only now and not now. And the story goes round and round and round.

This was part of my middle school curriculum. I initially read it in seventh grade and a few times later in my early teens. This is one of the few books that I have a full memory of. It haunted me. It still does. Is it better to have something and lose it or never have it at all?

My mother was a teenager when she gave birth to me. She read this book while she was pregnant and, when I was born, she named me after the protagonist. Anne with an "E". I first read this book when I was nine years old, sitting in a car during a rainstorm. I started in the morning and finished just as it was getting dark and my mother called me inside. I've read it many times since, along with the entire series. It gave me a safe world to live in. I love them all.

These essays illuminate a lot of my own family memories and traumas. This makes it both a difficult read and a nostalgic read. Going home when home is a difficult place brings up feelings that are difficult to explain to people outside of those experiences but Alicia manages to bring the reader in without turning her stories into trauma porn.

A beautiful gut punch of a read.

I'm not even sure I can call this a novel so much as an experience. Intensely poetic and crass, the main character's narrative slips in and out of dreams and, by the end of the book, a character of legend. The unflinching look at childhood trauma can be difficult to read.