Frances Johnson

This book is one of two or three favorite novels I've ever read. Levine's experiments with language and dismodernism are innovative and utterly unexpected. Levine's playful yet wrenching portal of a book gave me that sweet sense of awe for a writer's skill that comes once in a blue moon and makes me feel compelled to write and then read it again. Her use of intertextuality, paratactical maneuvers, and movement toward liminal spaces of consciousness that mime and morph and ironize the centrifugal force of a community hellbent on stigmatizing, marginalizing, and self-replicating conventions would be ideal teaching material for narrative theory, disability studies, and intersectional feminism. I could also see its intertextual play as useful for troubling outdated philosophies and approaches to psychology. It does the work Robbe-Grillet asked for in the mid-20th century--it invents its own form, it renders simplistic critiques impossible, and it breaks the reader's expectations in truly remarkable ways.