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And Lockwood was approaching it quickly when the story flipped into a very different Part Two. but there is a limit that I have for this sort of cleverness before it becomes, well, tedious. This was all very well, all very smart and clever…. Think if the ocean has a fever for years . . . it’s called a fever and you can die if you have one for a week. Think if your body changes 1-2 degrees . . . “The problem was that the dictator was very funny, which had maybe always been true of all dictators.” They are also poignant and touching and terribly on point with contemporary issues over womanhood, climate change, politics and legislation… often delivered in terse pithy oneliners with the punch of a tweet: the President (surely, Trump) is reimagined as the dictator and I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU’RE COOKING FOR DINNER NEVER SEND ME THE EGGPLANT AGAIN, MOM! she texted. We had told them a thousand times, but they never listened-as long as they lived and loved us, as long as they had split themselves open to have us, they would send us the peach in peach season. They used the winking one with its tongue out on our birthdays, they sent us long rows of the spurting three droplets when it rained. Our mothers could not stop using horny emojis. And they are often funny – genuinely funny – such as It is written in short segments, disjointed but there is a resonance between each one. In the first part of the novel, a bewildering fractured narrative has her speaking on stage across the world in Australia and Jamaica, about the internet, returning home to her husband, living life in the Portal through memes, posts, pieces and comments and likes, visiting family. The novel revolves around a woman – was she ever named? – who seems to have become an online media sensation on The Portal following a post “that said simply, Can a dog be twins? That was it.

This is not a synopsis that gives much away in this… peculiar and oddly moving novel.

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