Story: 7.0 / 10
Characters: 7.5
Setting: 9.0
Prose: 7.0 ( )

3.5 rounded up-- I think I need to sit with this one for a while and I'm not the right person to say whether or not it was good representation. But it was interesting and somewhat heartbreaking and I liked a lot of it. ( )

I didn't really connect with any of the characters, and it was easy to put down and forget about for days at a time. Unfortunately. The author showed potential though, still a good chance I'd check out another book of theirs, if it sounded like something more up my alley. ( )

Lots of things to like: the setting of Vilnius, Lithuania, and learning about some of its history, Thorpe’s voice for both the father and daughter characters who alternate as narrators (the latter through her emails), and the exploration of mental illness. There are aspects of the story that seem too contrived (e.g. finding the grandson of the family matriarch) and others which are disturbing (e.g. the celebration of the “rape birthday” and the philosophical musings on consent), but to her credit, Thorpe doesn’t offer easy resolution on more the one plot line. A near miss for a higher rating, and interested in more from this author.

Quotes:
On civilization, from Warner Herzog:
“Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.”

And this one:
“The idea that we are rational and in control of our actions is a recent and temporary delusion. For most of history, we have totally been murdering each other. We are just violent animals. We like to hurt each other. It feeds some part of our nature. And so we will find any excuse to do it. Sometimes it is greed, like with slavery or with the colonization of America. But sometimes we can kill people for hardly any reason at all.”

On Lithuania:
“There used to be a saying that in Vilnius the facades were Russian, the interiors were Polish, the streets were Jewish, and the ghosts were Lithuanian.”

“Vilnius itself was named after the River Vilnia, of course, though the exact location of the town had been chosen for spiritual reasons. It was built on a sacred pagan site where people came to communicate with the dead. The word Vilnia was etymologically related in Lithuanian to the words for ‘the departed,’ ‘ripple,’ and ‘devil.’”

“Darius told us about Napoleon’s campaign on Moscow (big fat disaster, like major, major cock-up in the deep doo-doo) that ended in 40,000 French soldiers descending on Vilnius only to push people out of their homes, steal all their food, and die anyway, because they were so starved they weren’t able to digest the food. They even broke into the university and ate the jars of organs preserved in alcohol. CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW HUNGRY YOU HAVE TO BE TO DO THAT? More French soldiers died in Vilnius than there were inhabitants of the city, and it was winter, so there was no way to bury them because the ground was crazy frozen. So naturally people began stacking the dead soldiers around buildings as a layer of extra insulation. Holes in the walls of the hospital were stuffed with hands, feet, heads, trunks, whatever would fit. For real, Fang, For real. The spring brought a terrible thaw and … wait for it … plague! Which, I mean, duh, but still.” ( )

This book gets an A+ from me for its realistic portrayal of all its characters and their interactions with one another. 17-year old Vera is one of the few relatable teen characters I've read. She possesses the ridiculous self-righteousness of a teen just as much as she is deeply introspective in a way that a human on the cusp of adulthood can be. ( )