The Book of X
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3.5 • 11 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
*Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards for Novel
*The Believer Book Awards, 2019: Editors' Longlists in Fiction
*The Northern California ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Awards 2019, Fiction longlist
*2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Longlist
*A Best Book of 2019 —Vulture, Entropy, Buzzfeed, Thrillist
"Etter brilliantly, viciously lays bare what it means to be a woman in the world, what it means to hurt, to need, to want, so much it consumes everything.” —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
"I loved every page of this gorgeous, grotesque, heartbreaking novel." —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
A surreal exploration of one woman's life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men.
The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday — school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents — with the surreal — rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats — Cassie’s realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
