While this new book shows [Blackburn] moving to more spacious realms, it’s built with the same meticulous craftsmanship of her shorter works. Her sentences zing with lively precision ... Blackburn’s idiosyncratic grief novel is as freshly devastating as they come.
Channels grief’s staggering capacity ... At its best, the authoritative and bizarre voice of the guides gives the book a playful quality that keeps it buoyant ... Coral often feels peripheral to the book’s formal pyrotechnics. Her passivity faintly contrasts with the agency of the gun-toting, unnamed hero of her own book, but Blackburn does not build on this polarity. The character is less a foil and more a shadow, visible only at fleeting angles. Grief tends toward incoherence, but our stories about it still need some shape if they are to be affecting and compelling. Dead in Long Beach, California works as a moodboard, but beneath its stylish sentences and unorthodox structure, there’s more void than vision.
Through the chorus, Blackburn brings us back to something inherently true about anyone experiencing this kind of loss: Our grief may seem singular, it may seem like it belongs solely to us, but that’s not exactly true. Grief is part of a larger system that connects us all to one another, and what we do with it, how we handle it, and what becomes of us after is not always fully in our control ... It’s a masterful feat of storytelling for Blackburn to constantly make the reader feel as if Coral is coming full circle, only to remind us she can’t ... We’re left with a profound and surprising demonstration of how there’s no way to fully outrun or outmaneuver or out-strategize the pain of loss. Even when we truly believe we can, the despair and disrepair of the loss will bring us to our knees and turn us in on ourselves. And although the idea that we don’t move beyond grief, we only learn to live with it is common, Blackburn’s debut novel provides a new vision of just how true this is, making that truth feel brand new again.
The work of a gifted writer who understands love bonds, family, death and inevitability, but also has a sense of humor about all of the above. Blackburn’s novel presents grief as memory puzzle, grief as creative license, grief as fuel for delusion and awakening.
...an engaging and original portrait of a woman on the verge ... Blackburn is formidable, her writing is experimental in intriguing and meaningful ways, and this is another winner.
Blackburn shares a deep intellect and odd sensibility with authors like George Saunders and Rion Amilcar Scott, but this novel is its own thing: intelligent, bizarre, and brilliantly written. An astonishing debut novel from a remarkably creative writer.
