With complexity and richness, Nova Ren Suma serves up a beautiful, visual, fresh interpretation of what it means to be lost. (From Goodreads)
I pretty much fell in love with Nova Ren Suma's writing in Imaginary Girls. She just has this way of crawling under your skin with her beautiful words and sneaking into your brain and flipping just one small switch that makes you view the world a little bit differently. It's amazing and unnerving the way she makes you feel a little mad, completely untethered to reality and floating in a dangerous, but somehow still gorgeous world. Reading Suma's work is an exercise in creating your own reality, while still being immersed in an intriguing story.
I really won't tell you much about this book, because I almost feel like uttering character names or places or any plot point would be betraying somebody's trust. All I'll say is there's so much more to this book than you'd know from the synopsis. The way Lauren's story unfolds contains its own sort of magic and it's something you have to experience without any preconceptions. So I'm not going to touch on the storyline.
Reading this book feels a little bit like that hovering in that in-between moment when you're awake, but still dreaming. You want to believe in what you're seeing, but somewhere you know that you're actually still in bed clinging to the last moments of blissful unconscious. It's safe, but still exciting and stepping too far back into the dream will remove you from the world, while waking up will make you lose all the images you're clinging so tightly to. So the best that you can do is cling to Lauren and use her as your guide as you walk this line. You can only follow her lead and just be on her side, because otherwise you could get a little lost.
The other aspect of this book that is so fantastic, is that it's one that will have your thoughts crawling for long after you finish. There's social commentary in here that I'm still trying to grasp. It seems obvious that Suma is drawing attention to missing girls, to runaways, to those still unfound, to those that the world has stopped looking for. But I feel like there's more to it than that - more issues that surface as the book goes on - that I don't think I'll wrap my head around until I sit and think it through and/ or talk it out. In fact, I feel like this is a book you need to read with someone else so that you can bounce your thoughts and feelings against someone else.
I can't recommend this book enough. Nova Ren Suma is a talented writer and this story is so well thought out and executed, I just want everyone to experience it. I really can't wait to see what kind of dreamworld she'll create next.
(Sidenote: I read acknowledgements to books before I read the book itself - which is probably weird, but in case it's not, please don't do this. Because the acknowledgements are next to an author's note, which can spoil the huge turn in this book. While I don't get upset over spoilers easily, you might, and this is my warning.)
