Oh my god, really? I'm 100 pages in and I want to shoot myself in head to put me out of my misery. What the hell am I reading? Shortlisted? Yikes. ( )

That was so.long. I think I overall enjoyed this, it's a stream of consciousness book with basically no plot. A middle aged mother in Ohio in about 2017. There are no paragraphs or sentences, every new thought just begins "the fact that..." There are endless lists and word associations, and truly just an encyclopedic narration of this woman's mind. There are many cultural touchstones that she keeps coming back to, Laura Ingles-Wilder's books being one of them which I'm more familiar with. A lot of commentary on Trump, and violence in America.
This is more boiled-down than a real person's actual stream of thought. Unless I'm the odd one out, a huge chunk of my waking thoughts is just a running list of what I have to do, what I have to remember, what everyone needs around me. I'm glad that was left out though, I don't need to hear how many loads of laundry someone else is doing in addition to my own.
There's a running mini-story of a mountain lion that pops up every now and then, separate from the run-on string of thoughts. The lion stalks prey, protects her cubs, is hunted and captured, injured, and ends up in captivity with her cubs. I don't really know what was meant by that, but to me it shows how a mother would prefer to be focused on raising her children until the violence of the outside world invades. That seems to run parallel to the thoughts of our narrator throughout.
If you're into experimental literature, you might check this out. ( )

Well this book took me forever to finish, but ended up becoming a favorite. There wasn't much a plot since it's one long stream of conciseness in a postmodern style. It's not an easy book and some people might get scared if they look at how it's written. For me, it was a good example what it's like inside the mind of someone with anxiety. The book covers a lot of topics. It wasn't publish that long ago, so it's still relevant. This was a fun ride! ( )

DAMN. Yes. Wow. Behold: the least articulate review I may ever have offered, for one of the best books I've read this year. ( )

the fact that I almost didn’t want this book to end, the fact that I needed to get back to my real life, the fact that it was convincing, engrossing, suspenseful, amusing, devastating, the fact that lone mountain lions have been spotted twice in Des Moines in recent years, the fact that I don’t think they were lionesses... ( )