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Content snapshot
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Violence
A lot
Nothing is staged in scene, but the narrator's mind is a rolling archive of American violence: mass and school shootings, gun culture, animal cruelty and factory farming, and the hunting of the lioness in the parallel strand
Language
Some
Occasional profanity inside an otherwise domestic voice
Sexual Content
Some
Passing adult references within the narrator's memory of her marriages and body
Substance Use
Barely any
Barely present
Emotional Intensity
Very heavy
The dominant register is anxiety: cancer recurrence, maternal fear, grief for her dead mother, and low-grade dread about the country
What this book is about
Ellmann's Booker-shortlisted experiment runs the interior monologue of an unnamed Ohio housewife circa 2017, chained together with the refrain "the fact that," and interleaved with the story of a mountain lion searching for her cubs. Kirkus, unimpressed, described it as "awfully hard work" with "too little payoff" and "literary experimentation that, while surely innovative, could have made its point in a quarter the space." The content risk is thematic rather than graphic: the narrator circles obsessively around school shootings, open carry, animal cruelty, industrial pollution, and her own cancer. Ellmann has said she is trying to shock and doesn't mind readers being uncomfortable.
Notes for sensitive readers
Reader-flagged moments and themes that may affect your experience.
Obsessive rumination on school shootings and gun violence
Animal cruelty and factory farming
Extreme length and unbroken stream-of-consciousness structure
Reader Verification
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