First book of 2021! Written in a plural first-person narrative (“we”), this book recounts a series of traumatic events between students and faculty at a low-residency writing MFA workshop in Vermont. The author, also a literary editor, is a graduate of a real-life program, the Bennington Writing Seminars, that no doubt provided the inspiration for this fictional college. The novel takes a very long time to identify who this “we” narrator is, and I spent much of the book wondering about this point, which was an interesting experience - you don’t generally spend an ENTIRE novel wondering whose lens is framing the story, and who is necessarily missing from the narrative because they are the one(s) telling it. The book repeatedly foreshadows some major event (lines like “we didn’t know then that...” or “of course now looking back we understand that...” I am paraphrasing but you get the gist), and the payoff of that major event that looms so large for the narrator(s) didn’t live up to that foreshadowing, in my opinion. That being said, the book is still a very good read, introducing fascinating three dimensional characters, exploring the dynamics of students and teachers in a small creative program, experimenting with collective storytelling and memory, and questioning the nature of art, writing and for whom we write. I have found myself thinking about it days after I finished reading, which is the sign of a food book. Published by @penguinrandomhouse, and I believe the paperback is being released in the next few weeks.