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A review by thebacklistborrower
You Feel It Just Below the Ribs by Jeffrey Cranor, Janina Matthewson
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I have been in love with the Within The Wires podcast from the start of the first season in 2016. NOTE: this book is stand-alone from the podcast, so you do not need to have listened to read this book. As a reader who loves worldbuilding where I have to use hints and unexplained references to “build-it-myself”, I can’t get enough of the show. So as soon as a book set in the same world was announced, I preordered it, prompting my local bookstore to kindly point out that it would not be available for another 10 months (Thanks @otterbooks!).
This book is set in an alternate 20th century and takes the form of a published journal by a famous, yet controversial, psychologist who lived through “the reckoning”, a combination of the two world wars plus the Spanish flu. Her journal starts with her as a young girl and refugee from the conflicts, through her training in psychology, and eventually the tactical use of her psychological treatments to facilitate the end of countries, families, and other “tribal affiliations” to preclude a future Reckoning.
I was eagerly looking forward to more depth to this world from the book. While it didn’t disappoint, it perfectly balanced expositional world building with an unreliable narrator and complete gaps in detail (nobody is great at keeping a journal full-time) to keep teasing the reader with what they don’t know, like in the podcast. But what you do get is an intense and intriguing story of a woman living through “the apocalypse”, as she states on her first page, annotated and commented on by the publisher “for clarity”. But what is real? What are the motivations of the publisher, who is very clearly a black-market publisher of banned books. What did they edit for their own ends? What isn’t stated, or known?
Anybody who likes dystopian fiction, unreliable narrators, political thrillers, and the best of worldbuilding should definitely pick up this book, and give the podcast a listen. It will not disappoint.