Status Updates From The Archer

“To be small was to be comfortable with the world being constantly upended: oh, but she wasn’t. The sun was going and the sky began to bruise from its absence.”

This novel...just incorporated one of my biggest pet peeves which is hammering the point of the title heavy-handedly into the plot. What happened to subtlety? To letting the reader connect the dots?? I'm so annoyed lol.

I have a love-hate feeling for this novel because on the one hand, it expresses the beauty of art (dancing) through words but on the other, it has little else to offer. The characters seem like disjointed pieces of a sketch pulled together and the plot meanders to the point of losing meaning...

I think the best parts of this novel are all contained in, not surprisingly, the dancing. I was a kathak dancer when I was young but left off when I was still young so now the memories are rather vague but as I read these moments, it fills me with a nostalgia.

I'll say this from the get-go, the novel is trying too hard to sound literary, which makes it anything but that. I actually tried starting this book earlier but it's so verbose that it's almost impossible to get into if you're not in the mood to plough through a stream of words to get to the point.