Book Review

Every chapter is stamped with its coordinates before a word of it begins. Season, year, the narrator's age, her school grade. Fall, early 2000s, eight years old, third grade. It looks like housekeeping, and it is the most consequential decision in the book.

A silver-haired stranger in an expensive suit knocks on a house in Springfield, Nebraska, and the seventeen-year-old who answers is holding an ice cream bucket, because she has spent the afternoon in an emergency room arguing with a cashew. The will he is carrying will move her family nine hundred miles.

February 1895. Three friends and a solicitor have given their advice, and Oscar Wilde tears the Marquess of Queensberry's calling card into four pieces, balls them up, and flicks them into a melting champagne bucket. He will not sue. Fifty-seven years of life follow from that flick.

A ninety-six-year-old woman sets the Christmas Eve table for the Feast of the Seven Fishes, waits for her granddaughter to announce she has gone vegan, and serves her a can of cat food on a plate. The granddaughter throws it at a life-size china baby Jesus.

A girl from the slums turns the knob on a lamp for the first time. A butterfly of gold lifts out of the base, beats its wings three times, and dissolves into honey-coloured light. Four hundred pages later she will find out what it was.