Maja's Reviews > We Sold Our Souls

(I REALLY struggled with what to tag this, genre-wise, so I'm compromising by going with my gut feelings as to the boxes it kind of checks, ha.)

This book MELTED MY GODDAMN BRAIN. Like, I literally could not actually objectively tell you whether I think it's good or whether I enjoyed the process of reading it; I THINK the answer to both is "yes"? But it is so hard to be sure when MY BRAIN IS LEAKING OUT OF MY EARS EVERY TIME I SO MUCH AS THINK ABOUT IT. Like, what.... what the fuck?? What the fuck did I just read?? What just happened to me?? THESE ARE THE REAL QUESTIONS THIS BOOK PROMPTS, BECAUSE SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCK.

In all seriousness, though: this book is, in many ways, unlike anything I've ever read before. Reading it feels like listening to a concept metal album would. It starts off slow, then absolutely crashes, then builds towards a mythology that feels equal parts grounded in reality and abstracted in metaphor, and by the end, you really have no idea what just happened. It's a lot! It's overwhelming, and deliberately so, and I think the effect I described above is very much intended, too, ha. It's off-putting and confusing and hard to grasp, but the fact that that's very much by design, and succeeds so thoroughly, makes me feel better about it. I have some minor craft-based complaints (the characters are a little hard to keep track of -- some feel a little unused/poorly fleshed out as a result, which is unsatisfying -- and the pacing is a bit off in places), but the premise and structure is just so absolutely, wildly creative and the writing is so visceral, disgusting and vivid and emotional and real, that it's hard to care too much about that. Definitely enough to stop it from being a Forever Fave for me, but nowhere near enough to stop it from being intensely enjoyable (if you can subsume "brainmelting" into "enjoyable," ha, which I think I would like to do here). The experience of reading this was wild, and the ending felt bewildering yet satisfying, and ... wow, just, damn, was this book ever a thing that happened to me. WAS IT EVER.

Also, I have not wanted a fictional album to exist so badly since I finished Daisy Jones and the Six and wanted to listen to Aurora more than anything. WHY CAN'T I FILL MY EARS WITH TROGLODYTE, IT'S WHAT WE DESERVE!!