2.5

Whilst this stream of consciousness is legitimately the most realistic stream of consciousness I have read, the format was extremely difficult for me to read, it took a ton of effort. ( )

This truly feels like spending a day inside someone's head, shifting from boredom to tipsy glee to jaw-clenching stress. A great read if you don't mind tricksy typography - or being charged full whack for what sits between short story and novella. ( )

This powerful novel is told in streams of consciousness. The plural is intentional here; Watson does a stellar job of representing, through both language and formatting, the default internal state in which several modes of consciousness and rumination occur simultaneously. She also accurately depicts the power of intrusive thoughts and the lengths to which people go to banish them.

At the start of the novel, we learn that the unnamed narrator has woken up with a hangover, that she has a boyfriend to whom she’s deeply attached, and an office job that she despises. The rest is revealed gradually, and Watson’s skillful introduction of “the rest” in a way that lets readers guess exactly what it is before the protagonist makes it explicit is what transforms this novel into 200 pages of continuous gut-punch. It is a tour de force.