![]() ![]() ![]() Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing she feared most. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. ![]() One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Between those elements and the experimental nature of the novel, I was mostly just confused. I almost never enjoy fantasy or horror (even light) and this is both. ![]() And that’s my one positive note about this novel. I think Everything Under is good in this respect, I do understand why Johnson did the story this way. I’m not crazy about experimental lit unless it works more for the story than the experiment. ![]()
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