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Hard Mouth
“An astute, luminous examination of the complexities of love and grief, with never a careless word. Hard Mouth is a blazing feat of a book.” —R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
An adventure novel upended by grief and propelled by the aberrant charm of its narrator, Hard Mouth is an unforgettable debut that explores what it takes to both existentially and literally survive.
For ten years, Denny’s father has battled cancer. The drawn-out loss has forged her into a dazed, antisocial young woman. On the clock, she works as a lab tech, readying fruit flies for experimentation. In her spare time, only her parents, an aggressively kind best friend, and her blowhard imaginary pal Gene—who she knows isn’t real—ornament her stale days in the D.C. suburbs.
Now her father’s cancer is back for a third time, and he’s rejecting treatment. Denny’s transgressive reaction is to flee. She begins to dismantle her life, constructing in its place the fantasy of perfect detachment. Unsure whether the impulse is monastic or suicidal, she rents a secluded cabin in the mountains. When she discovers life in the wilderness isn’t the perfect detachment she was expecting—and that she isn’t as alone as she’d hoped—Denny is forced to reckon with this failure while confronting a new life with its own set of pleasures and dangerous incursions.
Morbidly funny, subversive, and startling, Hard Mouth, the debut novel from 2018 NEA Creative Writing Fellow Amanda Goldblatt, unpacks what it means to live while others are dying.
An adventure novel upended by grief and propelled by the aberrant charm of its narrator, Hard Mouth is an unforgettable debut that explores what it takes to both existentially and literally survive.
For ten years, Denny’s father has battled cancer. The drawn-out loss has forged her into a dazed, antisocial young woman. On the clock, she works as a lab tech, readying fruit flies for experimentation. In her spare time, only her parents, an aggressively kind best friend, and her blowhard imaginary pal Gene—who she knows isn’t real—ornament her stale days in the D.C. suburbs.
Now her father’s cancer is back for a third time, and he’s rejecting treatment. Denny’s transgressive reaction is to flee. She begins to dismantle her life, constructing in its place the fantasy of perfect detachment. Unsure whether the impulse is monastic or suicidal, she rents a secluded cabin in the mountains. When she discovers life in the wilderness isn’t the perfect detachment she was expecting—and that she isn’t as alone as she’d hoped—Denny is forced to reckon with this failure while confronting a new life with its own set of pleasures and dangerous incursions.
Morbidly funny, subversive, and startling, Hard Mouth, the debut novel from 2018 NEA Creative Writing Fellow Amanda Goldblatt, unpacks what it means to live while others are dying.
256 pages, Paperback
First published August 13, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
August 8, 2019
Counterpoint has the most unique books. I’ve loved every one I’ve read, and I can’t stop staring at the dynamic cover on this one.
Denny’s father has had cancer for over ten years. Denny appears lost, and she doesn’t engage socially. She’s a lab tech working with fruit flies.
When Denny’s not working, she’s with her parents, her best friend, or her imaginary friend, Gene. She knows her imaginary friend is imaginary, by the way.
When Denny’s father’s cancer recurs, he declines treatment. Denny’s kneejerk reaction is to flee. She rents a cabin in the woods and seeks complete detachment from the world. What she finds is that she isn’t alone.
Hard Mouth is filled with clever, sometimes dark humor. It’s shocking and edgy and smart. It’s about grief and loss and how to survive even when our loved ones aren’t. I know like that seems like a dark theme, that last one, but the way the author addresses this is quite profound.
I received a complimentary copy. All opinions are my own.
Many of my reviews can also be found on my blog: www.jennifertarheelreader.com
Denny’s father has had cancer for over ten years. Denny appears lost, and she doesn’t engage socially. She’s a lab tech working with fruit flies.
When Denny’s not working, she’s with her parents, her best friend, or her imaginary friend, Gene. She knows her imaginary friend is imaginary, by the way.
When Denny’s father’s cancer recurs, he declines treatment. Denny’s kneejerk reaction is to flee. She rents a cabin in the woods and seeks complete detachment from the world. What she finds is that she isn’t alone.
Hard Mouth is filled with clever, sometimes dark humor. It’s shocking and edgy and smart. It’s about grief and loss and how to survive even when our loved ones aren’t. I know like that seems like a dark theme, that last one, but the way the author addresses this is quite profound.
I received a complimentary copy. All opinions are my own.
Many of my reviews can also be found on my blog: www.jennifertarheelreader.com
August 9, 2019
My review for the Chicago Tribune:
What happens when you spend so much time helping someone in distress that you become severely distressed yourself? Compassion fatigue is a condition that frequently affects caregivers and health-care professionals.
Amanda Goldblatt, an English instructor at Northeastern Illinois University and a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, offers a surprising and grimly funny take on this state, also known as secondary traumatic stress, in her debut novel “Hard Mouth,” a pithy and offbeat blend of cancer story and adventure tale.
Denise, aka Denny, the directionless 20-something protagonist and her parents’ only child, spends her nights working with fruit flies as a lab technician in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Her beloved father has had recurrent, terminal cancer on and off for roughly a decade. When he receives his first diagnosis, Denny, at 14, feels “a confused emotional flatulence” and develops “stress-related heartburn” as well as an imaginary friend named Gene, to whom she turns as coping mechanism. The ghostly Gene, a composite of characters from the classic movies she likes to watch with her father, claims to have been friends with Cary Grant. Throughout the novel, Goldblatt uses their sassy and wide-ranging conversations to add dynamism to Denny’s otherwise profound and solitary alienation.
When her father receives his second diagnosis, Denny is finishing up her degree at a local college, and when he receives the third, she has lived so long “under the reeking pendulum of death” that she is ill-equipped to handle the news. “I was filled to the brim with dread; it threatened to spill blackly from my mouth,” she thinks. After her father announces, over an awkward and moribund family dinner, that he has decided that he will not accept treatment, and that “We’re just going to let everything take its course,” neither her real-life friend Ken nor the lingering Gene can do much to comfort her.
The ongoing emergency of her father’s protracted illness has created in Denny an extreme state of tension and preoccupation, and with this declaration, she hits her breaking point. Obsessed with the idea that “I was simply a defenseless meatbag,” she is overcome by the need to “GET AWAY. The clarion call of the oversaturated and truly cracked.”
Though she has lived an entirely soft, suburban life, she takes flight off the grid, responding to an online posting to rent an old cabin with no phone or internet service on a remote mountainside accessible only by small plane or multi-day hike. In other words, a place where “I was no one to anyone but myself.” Denny is too hardened an individual to be miraculously transformed by the sublimity of her surroundings, and Goldblatt is too original a stylist to succumb to the romantic tropes of a conventional wilderness narrative. Rather than romance, what Denny experiences with nature is “a sweaty intimacy, the sort I could then handle.”
Denny learns few transformative lessons about life or herself, but rather experiences a series of smaller revelations, including that “With no responsibility to be a person, I found I was bored. … The drawback of solitude is boredom, is an excess of agency, is yourself.”
Detached as Denny is, not a lot happens plot-wise in the survival section of the novel, during which she has only two visitors, a stray cat and a sullen man. In Denny, Goldblatt creates an almost claustrophobic character study of a bleak, depressed, and selfish protagonist, deeply unlikeable to herself and thus virtually incapable of accepting any overtures of affection or friendship from loved ones and strangers alike. But Goldblatt keeps the pages turning with her incisive descriptions of Denny’s interior state, coupled with her ineptitude as an adventurer and her physical suffering as she experiences the rougher sides of roughing it.
What emerges is a portrait of protracted grief, the deep sorrow that usually comes with the event of someone’s death, but in this case comes preemptively and over an excruciatingly extended period. By the end, “Hard Mouth” leaves readers to consider the vast human question of how to justify going on living — or as Denny’s father puts it, “keeping body and soul together” —when death and suffering are all around.
What happens when you spend so much time helping someone in distress that you become severely distressed yourself? Compassion fatigue is a condition that frequently affects caregivers and health-care professionals.
Amanda Goldblatt, an English instructor at Northeastern Illinois University and a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, offers a surprising and grimly funny take on this state, also known as secondary traumatic stress, in her debut novel “Hard Mouth,” a pithy and offbeat blend of cancer story and adventure tale.
Denise, aka Denny, the directionless 20-something protagonist and her parents’ only child, spends her nights working with fruit flies as a lab technician in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Her beloved father has had recurrent, terminal cancer on and off for roughly a decade. When he receives his first diagnosis, Denny, at 14, feels “a confused emotional flatulence” and develops “stress-related heartburn” as well as an imaginary friend named Gene, to whom she turns as coping mechanism. The ghostly Gene, a composite of characters from the classic movies she likes to watch with her father, claims to have been friends with Cary Grant. Throughout the novel, Goldblatt uses their sassy and wide-ranging conversations to add dynamism to Denny’s otherwise profound and solitary alienation.
When her father receives his second diagnosis, Denny is finishing up her degree at a local college, and when he receives the third, she has lived so long “under the reeking pendulum of death” that she is ill-equipped to handle the news. “I was filled to the brim with dread; it threatened to spill blackly from my mouth,” she thinks. After her father announces, over an awkward and moribund family dinner, that he has decided that he will not accept treatment, and that “We’re just going to let everything take its course,” neither her real-life friend Ken nor the lingering Gene can do much to comfort her.
The ongoing emergency of her father’s protracted illness has created in Denny an extreme state of tension and preoccupation, and with this declaration, she hits her breaking point. Obsessed with the idea that “I was simply a defenseless meatbag,” she is overcome by the need to “GET AWAY. The clarion call of the oversaturated and truly cracked.”
Though she has lived an entirely soft, suburban life, she takes flight off the grid, responding to an online posting to rent an old cabin with no phone or internet service on a remote mountainside accessible only by small plane or multi-day hike. In other words, a place where “I was no one to anyone but myself.” Denny is too hardened an individual to be miraculously transformed by the sublimity of her surroundings, and Goldblatt is too original a stylist to succumb to the romantic tropes of a conventional wilderness narrative. Rather than romance, what Denny experiences with nature is “a sweaty intimacy, the sort I could then handle.”
Denny learns few transformative lessons about life or herself, but rather experiences a series of smaller revelations, including that “With no responsibility to be a person, I found I was bored. … The drawback of solitude is boredom, is an excess of agency, is yourself.”
Detached as Denny is, not a lot happens plot-wise in the survival section of the novel, during which she has only two visitors, a stray cat and a sullen man. In Denny, Goldblatt creates an almost claustrophobic character study of a bleak, depressed, and selfish protagonist, deeply unlikeable to herself and thus virtually incapable of accepting any overtures of affection or friendship from loved ones and strangers alike. But Goldblatt keeps the pages turning with her incisive descriptions of Denny’s interior state, coupled with her ineptitude as an adventurer and her physical suffering as she experiences the rougher sides of roughing it.
What emerges is a portrait of protracted grief, the deep sorrow that usually comes with the event of someone’s death, but in this case comes preemptively and over an excruciatingly extended period. By the end, “Hard Mouth” leaves readers to consider the vast human question of how to justify going on living — or as Denny’s father puts it, “keeping body and soul together” —when death and suffering are all around.
December 17, 2019
Dear God! What is this?!?! This book was freaking weird! From the description it sounded pretty good, but what I got was a strange book, that fell off the rails. Full disclosure, I only had 30 pages to read and I could not take it anymore, so it’s a semi DNF. I will still count it toward my reading challenge goal, since I read so much of it.
The characters sucked. The story sucked. I did not feel anything for these characters, and it is books like this that make me tired of the experimental novel, or whatever this is.
Hated it! Do a hard pass on this one!
The characters sucked. The story sucked. I did not feel anything for these characters, and it is books like this that make me tired of the experimental novel, or whatever this is.
Hated it! Do a hard pass on this one!
August 26, 2019
Bleak and antiseptic in humor, this novel refines the "interior 'unlikable' but make it fashion" so prolific and yet so elusive in a genuine strangeness. A swift beach read for those stranded in a dark hotel room, avoiding the beach and trying to avoid themselves.
April 29, 2021
one of the strangest books i’ve ever read
August 13, 2019
Hard Mouth is on its surface a sort of critical take on the “Journey to Find Oneself” trope and its recently-popular iteration, “Woman Goes Into the Woods to Find Herself After Terrible Event”. It’s the story of a young woman, Denny (Denice) who, finding out that her father has decided to pursue hospice after 10 years of fighting a terminal cancer, decides to run off to a remote cabin in the woods rather than face this reality.
Despite her planned escape from reality, the book does away with the feel-good, self-help-for-the-new-age vibes of more common examples of the aforementioned tropes in favor of a healthy dose of, well, reality. At the book’s beginning, Denny is the person we’ve all dreaded becoming. She’s stuck in a dead-end job with a single friend, already suffused with suburban ennui despite her situation as a single young woman. She’s exactly the type of person whose internal monologue you’ve always both dreaded and wished for—eloquent and insightful into her own situation/emotions but at the same time unable to help herself from being cruel to those around her.
While she’s not quite sympathetic, she’s definitely relatable in many of her worst qualities (even if I hated to admit it). Denny is that voice in the back of your head that asks “what would happen if I just left, right now, and never looked back, others be damned” every time that pesky reality comes crashing in. Hers is a trauma that we’ve all shared, the trauma of growing up. It’s just that her anxiety is one notch to the left of ours and in the end she’s willing to take the plunge. Denise, after all, still has an imaginary friend as an adult, and that’s not the only time her internal world bleeds into the external by the book’s end. But of course, the real world is the real world and you can’t escape reality, only trade one reality for another.
It’s Denny’s internal monologue that gives the novel most of its inertia. Even her more simple observations pack a cool wallop thanks to Goldblatt’s masterful prose. The novel isn’t dense per say, but it feels like every word is very carefully chosen. Definitely a book-lovers book, with rhetoric that is both florid and effervescent and dialog that does a good job walking the line between literary and believable. Even in the quiet solitude (and then not-solitude) of the cabin, the book is a quick read and compelling all the way through. Hard Mouth darts deftly between being wit and grief, reminding us how often in reality the two are intertwined for us humans. Fair warning that this book will definitely stick with you long after you finish and leave you with the so-called “book hangover,” hungry for more.
Despite her planned escape from reality, the book does away with the feel-good, self-help-for-the-new-age vibes of more common examples of the aforementioned tropes in favor of a healthy dose of, well, reality. At the book’s beginning, Denny is the person we’ve all dreaded becoming. She’s stuck in a dead-end job with a single friend, already suffused with suburban ennui despite her situation as a single young woman. She’s exactly the type of person whose internal monologue you’ve always both dreaded and wished for—eloquent and insightful into her own situation/emotions but at the same time unable to help herself from being cruel to those around her.
While she’s not quite sympathetic, she’s definitely relatable in many of her worst qualities (even if I hated to admit it). Denny is that voice in the back of your head that asks “what would happen if I just left, right now, and never looked back, others be damned” every time that pesky reality comes crashing in. Hers is a trauma that we’ve all shared, the trauma of growing up. It’s just that her anxiety is one notch to the left of ours and in the end she’s willing to take the plunge. Denise, after all, still has an imaginary friend as an adult, and that’s not the only time her internal world bleeds into the external by the book’s end. But of course, the real world is the real world and you can’t escape reality, only trade one reality for another.
It’s Denny’s internal monologue that gives the novel most of its inertia. Even her more simple observations pack a cool wallop thanks to Goldblatt’s masterful prose. The novel isn’t dense per say, but it feels like every word is very carefully chosen. Definitely a book-lovers book, with rhetoric that is both florid and effervescent and dialog that does a good job walking the line between literary and believable. Even in the quiet solitude (and then not-solitude) of the cabin, the book is a quick read and compelling all the way through. Hard Mouth darts deftly between being wit and grief, reminding us how often in reality the two are intertwined for us humans. Fair warning that this book will definitely stick with you long after you finish and leave you with the so-called “book hangover,” hungry for more.
September 6, 2019
Good novel
This is well-written and thoughtful, purposely crude in spots as Goldblatt investigates the limits and limitations of human sympathy and our relations with each other inside families and outside them. Well done.
This is well-written and thoughtful, purposely crude in spots as Goldblatt investigates the limits and limitations of human sympathy and our relations with each other inside families and outside them. Well done.
February 6, 2020
Vivid and engrossing, nearly missed my metro stop several times because the book pulled me into its world, its language so promptly each time I picked it up. Beautifully realized and complex novel.
February 23, 2020
This was ok. It started off as a bit of a snooze but picked up partway through. It never really picked up enough for me to feel more than sort of meh about it.
July 6, 2019
The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Submission Review #2 (expected pub date Aug 13, 2019/much thanks to Counterpoint Press for the advanced copy):
Whoa: Hard Mouth is weird. Like unashamedly and relentlessly bizarre—I loved it from beginning to end. The novel is about Denny, a sort of sad loner young woman residing in the DC Metropolitan area. Her father is dying of cancer, a prolonged fight stretched out over the past ten years, so Denny and her family are stuck in this uncomfortable state of constantly anticipating a loss. When her dad decides to forgo treatment and end things once and for all, Denny sabotages experimental fruit flies at her low-level lab job and literally runs away from the situation to an isolated shack in the woods. There she encounters dangerous storms, feisty cats, and horrible men (misogyny, like loss, proves to be inescapable). And I haven’t even mentioned Denny’s bonkers BFF Ken, less an actual person than a non-combative yes man for all Denny’s bad decisions, and her imaginary BFF Gene, a ridiculous showboating old timey film star.
The ending of the novel is brilliant. Not exactly an anti-climax, but certainly a reversal of audience and character expectations. But then again, death is never predictable. The way that Goldblatt consciously upends so many narrative conventions seems to always be leaning toward that fact.
This book made me think something that I always adore thinking about art: “I can’t believe Amanda Goldblatt did that! I didn’t even know you could do that!” I’ve already recommended this book to multiple friends.
Whoa: Hard Mouth is weird. Like unashamedly and relentlessly bizarre—I loved it from beginning to end. The novel is about Denny, a sort of sad loner young woman residing in the DC Metropolitan area. Her father is dying of cancer, a prolonged fight stretched out over the past ten years, so Denny and her family are stuck in this uncomfortable state of constantly anticipating a loss. When her dad decides to forgo treatment and end things once and for all, Denny sabotages experimental fruit flies at her low-level lab job and literally runs away from the situation to an isolated shack in the woods. There she encounters dangerous storms, feisty cats, and horrible men (misogyny, like loss, proves to be inescapable). And I haven’t even mentioned Denny’s bonkers BFF Ken, less an actual person than a non-combative yes man for all Denny’s bad decisions, and her imaginary BFF Gene, a ridiculous showboating old timey film star.
The ending of the novel is brilliant. Not exactly an anti-climax, but certainly a reversal of audience and character expectations. But then again, death is never predictable. The way that Goldblatt consciously upends so many narrative conventions seems to always be leaning toward that fact.
This book made me think something that I always adore thinking about art: “I can’t believe Amanda Goldblatt did that! I didn’t even know you could do that!” I’ve already recommended this book to multiple friends.
June 5, 2019
What do you do when your dad's cancer is back and he has decided to stop pursuing treatment? Why you quit your job in a very big way, trade in your car for a truck, and rent out a remote cabin for a year without telling anyone who loves you. Goldblatt's debut novel is a story of a young women who needs to lose herself in order to find herself. This common storyline gets a new look with the openness of Denny who just doesn't know what to do anymore. She makes regrettable decisions, but she follows her intuition and does what she needs to do to deal with grief and the endless possibilities of her future.
October 23, 2019
Pretentious.
June 18, 2019
Hard Mouth is an ambitious undertaking by Amanda Goldblatt in this debut novel. Her writing style is stark and spare with excellent imagery. Hard Mouth is told by the main character, Denny, a lab technician whose father has been battling cancer off and on for ten years. The opening lines of the book are, "In this story I do not mean to hide myself. Rather I want to be obvious. I want you to see, at least, me. " This objective is met in that the book centers on Denny and her thoughts and actions, even though these thoughts and actions are often open to criticism. When her father's cancer returns and he makes the choice to refuse further treatment, Denny slowly unravels and decides to flee into the wilderness. The story line almost unravels at this point and at times descends into madness, but then, Denny herself is unraveling and descending into madness. Goldblatt shows great promise and I hope to see more from this author in the future.
April 21, 2022
if this book was funny, it went right over my head. denise is a friendless, selfish young woman who has an imaginary friend. her first act is to cause destruction at the lab where she works, get drunk, and publicly screw a near stranger.
her second act is to abandon her mother and father, who are dealing with cancer her father has chosen to not treat, and will die from.
she rents a cabin she needs to be airlifted into, to face what she maybe? hopes will be her death. she shoots a cat and then adopts it. a man is in her cabin and tho she's asked him to leave and hates him, they stay together until she possibly kills him, at which time she goes back to her family and all is forgiven.
can't imagine the author's life that she lived with this story and put it out into the world. can't fathom the writing on the book jacket. i read it with a morbid curiosity- where can this possibly go? wtf?
her second act is to abandon her mother and father, who are dealing with cancer her father has chosen to not treat, and will die from.
she rents a cabin she needs to be airlifted into, to face what she maybe? hopes will be her death. she shoots a cat and then adopts it. a man is in her cabin and tho she's asked him to leave and hates him, they stay together until she possibly kills him, at which time she goes back to her family and all is forgiven.
can't imagine the author's life that she lived with this story and put it out into the world. can't fathom the writing on the book jacket. i read it with a morbid curiosity- where can this possibly go? wtf?
October 2, 2019
This is one of those books that will stay with me for a long while. The main character, Denny, is such an oddball person. Unlikable, yet I found myself hoping only the best for her. losing people you love, no matter the age, Its hard.
I dont know what to say. I've read a few scattered reviews where it was pointed out that it was humorous. I didn't pick up on any humor, just tremendous sadness and outright recklessness. I suppose this is not my generation thing. I felt I was reading about one self centered anti social, fucked up kid.
I think that I was fooled into thinking her foray into the woods would be something close to enlightenment. But it quickly became apparent it was frightening and very scary.
I'm giving it 4 stars because even though the story upset me , it was well written and thought provoking
I dont know what to say. I've read a few scattered reviews where it was pointed out that it was humorous. I didn't pick up on any humor, just tremendous sadness and outright recklessness. I suppose this is not my generation thing. I felt I was reading about one self centered anti social, fucked up kid.
I think that I was fooled into thinking her foray into the woods would be something close to enlightenment. But it quickly became apparent it was frightening and very scary.
I'm giving it 4 stars because even though the story upset me , it was well written and thought provoking
April 3, 2021
It's wild to read a book, especially one this good, written by someone you know, or at least once knew, in real life. The natural inclination is to read it with their voice, and picture them in the role of the first-person narrator. Of course then you start to wonder, is any of this even remotely autobiographical, am I doing myself a disservice by imagining no discrepancy between author and narrator? Probably so, to some extent. Am I just bragging in this GoodReads review, look at me, I'm so cool, I know an author of a real, live, BOOK? Probably so, to some extent. What I know is, author known to me or not, the book is a thought-provoking hoot, one that made me laugh out loud and physically cringe at various points throughout. Thanks Amanda, I look forward to yer next novel!
June 3, 2019
Hard Mouth's heroine Denny is grieving the eventual death of her father from cancer and, depending on which way you look at it, she's either in a self-destructive tailspin or she's making moves to find out who she truly is. When isolation seems like the only course of action, Denny rents a secluded cabin: along for the ride is Gene, an admittedly-unreal imaginary friend who's quick with bad advice and anecdotal quips. Armed with a gun, meal-replacement bars, wilderness guides, and an abundance of free time, Denny sets out to satisfy the escapist impulse and discover a new way of living. Hard Mouth is ambitious in its attempt to map the uncharted wilderness of loss, and offers an unflinching examination on the kind of animal that grief makes of us.
February 16, 2020
I did not enjoy this book. It got lots of hype for a strong debut, but fell totally flat for me. I feel like this book thought it was smarter than it really is. The main character, Denny, is dealing with grief, yes. And I can even understand the impulse to abdicate completely from one's life. But ultimately, I found Denny completely unlikeable, very unsympathetic, and the plot swung from WTF moment to WTF moment (dear god, the cat...) and I just didn't enjoy it.
May 14, 2020
Huh.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I couldn’t relate to the narrator; she lacked empathy and spoke in such a matter of fact way I wonder if she’s on the autism spectrum. I started this book because I’m a sucker for a novel with a female lead alone in the woods. That part didn’t last long enough for my liking, and I’m not convinced she learned anything about herself. This is a puzzler.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I couldn’t relate to the narrator; she lacked empathy and spoke in such a matter of fact way I wonder if she’s on the autism spectrum. I started this book because I’m a sucker for a novel with a female lead alone in the woods. That part didn’t last long enough for my liking, and I’m not convinced she learned anything about herself. This is a puzzler.
January 9, 2023
Coincidentally, I was reading this at the same time as "They're Your Parents, Too! How Siblings Can Survive Their Parents' Aging Without Driving Each Other Crazy," which talks about how the death of a parent is the end of one's "first family," and how hard and shattering it can be. This novel is that idea playing out to an extreme--a young woman, whose father is dying, running away from civilization in a need to feel primal and as physically alone as the impending death is making her feel.
March 15, 2020
A slow and sometimes frustratingly disconnected first two thirds, but the final third suddenly took off and became embodied and gripping. Full disclosure: I spent time with the author in grad school and helped with some details on working with Drosophila. So I may have wanted to like this, but that doesn't take away from the skill at work here.
January 26, 2020
The protagonist learns that you can't escape death. So many times while reading this book, I was struck by the beauty and wisdom of different sentences. This was a really strong debut by Amanda Goldblatt - can't wait to read what's next!
July 30, 2023
as a lab grunt, I was really excited to read a book about someone who works in science, but could not be called a scientist. unfortunately this book spent like twenty minutes in the lab and then the rest of the time weeding through some really convoluted prose.
August 24, 2023
No chapters required
Beautifully rendered vision of a journey into death and life. A seamless experience of reading, imagining and feeling was effortless, enlightening and spellbinding throughout.
Beautifully rendered vision of a journey into death and life. A seamless experience of reading, imagining and feeling was effortless, enlightening and spellbinding throughout.
August 24, 2023
Hard Mouth feels a bit like entering another world. The language is dazzling and a true original. I loved this book. A thought-provoking exploration of grief with a memorable protagonist who really grows on you and who is thrillingly unfiltered. I'm eager to see what Amanda does next.
Want to read
June 20, 2019COVERGOALS.
September 23, 2019
Not one word was wasted in writing this tale of grief, disassociation, and identity. Wildly authentic point of view. I loved this book!
December 1, 2019
3+ Stars
January 4, 2020
Too pretentious.
January 19, 2020
Stirring. Alternately dispassionate and bursting with heart. Crackling prose. Exquisite craftsmanship. A story of loss, family, and feeling unmoored from what society tells you that you should feel.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews