This book has a surreal air that sets it apart from other books of its kind because it is great, but you don't know why. Its pages drift easily from one to the next like fall leaves caught in a breeze, but not because it is stylistic because it is not overly so. If you were to separate its words or even its sentences, you would get just facts. But it's when those facts are strewn together, or the way in which they are strewn together, that grabs the reader's attention. It's not even a discussion of show versus tell, because this book is neither. If I had to categorize it, it'd be not-tell.

You must have the ability to read through the lines of what you know about telling--or reading--a story in the form of a novel in order to enjoy this book. Thayer breaks all the rules: she leaves things out; she not only skips from one foot to the other but from side to side and upwards and backwards. It will take you a minute--or a hundred--to get the bearings you lost in your mind whilst your mind got lost in this book. You must possess the ability to figure out things; you must be able to think for yourself in order to 'get' it. If Palahniuk wrote a tragically epic love story with likable characters, this would be it.

They say that anyone can bring meaning to a reader in enough time, but it takes the most talented author to make a reader feel something with the smallest amount of words on the least amount of pages. This novel is short and it is lightning fast; I basically read it in an hour. Nevertheless, it is the epitome of a book hangover; you'll be lying awake thinking about it all night. It left me trying to guess what the characters will do. I don't know if I'll ever figure that out, but maybe someone else will, and that, of course, is the beauty of literature. This novel is a risky endeavor that, ultimately, I think was worth taking.