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A review by lores
Private Rites by Julia Armfield
4.0
Julia Armfield has this addictive ability to completely absorb me in her prose. Just a chapter or two of her writing and I’m surprised by the real world, any thoughts that aren’t in her voice suddenly jerk me awake.
The drowned world she’s created is amazing and her ability to merge dread and the mundane should honestly be studied. This is a brilliant climate novel which will hit you with some home truths about how we relate to the world, the earth and the changing weather.
Perhaps because of how absorbed I was in those aspects of the story, I occassionally felt that the different halves of this book were on the cusp of being too many things at once. One character has a thought, suddenly, that ‘this is the wrong genre’ and despite that self-awareness, the sisters’ stories, the city, and the background mystery did sometimes feel like they weren’t quite in step with each other. The sister’s tensions are sometimes overwhelming and the twist ending felt both strongly signposted and oddly seperate to the rest of the novel, which was a shame after being pulled along so effortlessly for so long.
But I think Private Rites is going to linger with me regardless. It’s world is in my brain like Armfield’s vivid description of one sister’s memories of her mother; ‘spreading across her like lichen, like something resembling skin’
The drowned world she’s created is amazing and her ability to merge dread and the mundane should honestly be studied. This is a brilliant climate novel which will hit you with some home truths about how we relate to the world, the earth and the changing weather.
Perhaps because of how absorbed I was in those aspects of the story, I occassionally felt that the different halves of this book were on the cusp of being too many things at once. One character has a thought, suddenly, that ‘this is the wrong genre’ and despite that self-awareness, the sisters’ stories, the city, and the background mystery did sometimes feel like they weren’t quite in step with each other. The sister’s tensions are sometimes overwhelming and the twist ending felt both strongly signposted and oddly seperate to the rest of the novel, which was a shame after being pulled along so effortlessly for so long.
But I think Private Rites is going to linger with me regardless. It’s world is in my brain like Armfield’s vivid description of one sister’s memories of her mother; ‘spreading across her like lichen, like something resembling skin’