scrubjayspeaks

By the author of We Used to Live Here.

Macy is a depressed young woman caring for her kleptomaniac younger sister after their father died in a car crash. She's desperately poor and more or less unemployable, due to her resting bitch face and bad employment history which includes stuff like throwing sodas on mean customers.

She answers a Craigslist ad to be the caretaker of a home with a bizarre set of rules covering when certain lights must be turned on or off, what to do if she sees a rabbit, etc. When she breaks a rule, she has to open a sealed envelope or get a creepy phone call, both of which contain further instructions. Each broken rule causes the overall situation to escalate, and supposedly causes bad consequences for her personally though the latter mostly doesn't happen. Things escalate quickly as she breaks rule after rule because, as it turns out, she's apparently incapable of doing anything right. No wonder she can't keep a job!

The entire structure of the book feels like OCD, and Macy acquires a sort of magically-inflicted OCD as well. So it's all a metaphor for mental illness/grief. But the whole thing feels mechanical - it's set up a bit like a video game and Macy, who is kind of a sad sack, feels like she's just there to be put through it. She breaks the first rule the first day, quickly followed by every other rule. Her complete and total incompetence made me lose all interest in her. It would have helped if she'd been on top of the rules for a while, rather than instantly failing - especially since the random elderly woman who preceded her seemed to have succeeded for three months. Macy couldn't manage for one hour!

Literally nothing is explained. I don't mind some ambiguity or Things Man Cannot Know, but in this case, it felt like the author was just throwing cool stuff at a wall with nothing behind it. (What happened to Caleb, the son of the previous caretaker? Why did the rules work? Were they arbitrary, or was there some weird logic to them? What caused people to get stuck in time loops? Were people getting stuck in time loops? Were the blue-eyed people ghosts or something else? Who was making the phone calls, how were they getting through, and how did they know what to say? Why was the house so important? What was up with parallel realities? What was the entity?)

I also would have liked it to be more ambiguous, at least for a while, whether any of the magical elements were real or just believed to be real. And it would have been nice if Macy was slowly sucked into belief by means of doing the rituals, rather than having a magical switch in her head flipped to suddenly make her believe.

The book was engrossing while I was reading it, but ultimately unsatisfying. It felt both flat and overly slick. I wonder if We Used to Live Here is better, or more of the same.

Content notes: The entire book is one big OCD trigger. There is threatened/implied harm to rabbits, but though one wild rabbit is found dead of unknown causes, the rabbits we meet end up fine.

To come!