Rebecca Dinerstein

I mean, it’s about nothing. Four or five characters, having a series of awkward, increasingly mortifying interactions—traumas turned mundane by deadpan patter—all hosted by an unreal, unreliable narrator. But the thing is exquisite. I’ll never read it again—I can’t recommend it or buy a copy for a friend—but damn. Quite a book. Like a painting in a loose style, where a staccato of colored strokes result in something—and you can’t quite be sure, because not every shallow show more stroke seems intentional, not every word lands, but it all becomes something and you know it works. Fantastic. show less

Super clever, a little esoteric and off-kilter. Narrated by someone who is super smart or a little crazy….Nell Barber worked on her Phd at Columbia on toxins – esp. poisonous plants and trying to alter them so they cancel the poison out of themselves. When a fellow student, Rachel, dies due to poison exposure in the lab, the whole thing is shut down. Nell is out of school/work, she and boyfriend Tom break-up, she loses the apt. that was his mother's and she is summarily reduced to show more bartending, pestering her former grad studies advisor, Joan and generally coming a little undone. There is much humor here, despite the dire circumstances - Joan's husband Barry is a putz, Nell's best friend Mishti is brilliant and supportive, and Tom, her ex, remains an erstwhile friend. All these satellite characters cross paths with each other - in increasingly complex arcs, while Nell stays at the center, spinning in her own orbit. Ultimately, she has some issues from her Kansas past to address before she can break free - and even those attempts get a little cringe-y occasionally. Great writing: "Freedom can be hard to come by when you grow up in landlocked Kansas, located exactly at the midpoint between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, which means you have the farthest way to go either way to get out, which means you must get out, eventually, after you grow out of Kansas, which you didn’t, which I did, which is the first plain fact about me, the place I will perpetually be in the process of exiting, just as you are the far and temperate and coastal state I am always and never entering." p. 22 Bottom line: revenge is a dish best served with poison? show less

I keep clicking on four stars, and then five stars, and then four stars...which maybe means that a 4.5 is in order.

I did not realize that this book was funny until about one hour in, and then my experience of it did a 180. It's hilarious, like, almost-did-a-spit-take, chortled-to-myself-on-my-morning-walk hilarious, and the audio is narrated by Jenny Slate, which doesn't hurt at all. (side bar: I found out while poking around that Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is also the author of The Sunlit show more Night, which was made into a movie. I cried while watching the trailer at least twice; Jenny Slate also stars in that movie.) But, crucially, it's funny in an unexpected way. Usually when books are funny they announce it with their cadence, but here, I wasn't sure if a sentence was going to end with a pang or with a laugh.

I did find there to be a lot of sentences that did so much inverting of words and subverting of expectations that I could see how a reader could get tired of that; I thought the book was just short enough that it didn't matter, and I was always waiting for the next joke so I didn't care. The central relationship is so bizarre that maybe folks didn't find it believable. But I think the book is ultimately about...desire? The fact that I know that it's definitely about something but am not sure what makes it a high-star book in my mind, because I know that I'll be able to keep going back to it and keep thinking about it for a while. show less

This is a story of botany and desire, poison and cures, and about the interconnected, unrequited loves among the six main characters, connections too complex to explain in this short review.

It’s narrated by Nell, once a PhD candidate but now expelled, in a series of short chapters, each named for a person or place or plant or food or concept, something that appears in the chapter. It’s a journal, a lab notebook, a love letter to Nell’s former professor though still her mentor, Joan.

I show more can’t say I understood everything that happened in Hex, but I do say I enjoyed every page, every well-crafted paragraph written in a way that, as far as I know, only Dinerstein Knight can write. There is much in this small-format book of barely two hundred pages. It’s powerful, and funny, and deep, and mysterious. show less