Sorting out my feelings on this one as I type: The last 80 pages were so fantastic, and it's a shame that it takes as long as it does to get to the thrust of the work. This is, I think, a novel about grief: a woman intensely burdened by her secrets but a champion compartmentalizer reaches a breaking point as the world is dying. She is forced, by selfish needs, to undertake a journey that trashes her life, exploring the legacy of her lost, beloved brother: the desires and interests that he shared with her, and everything about him she had never known. The grief performs a bit of a double (triple?) function: her grief over a dying world is not authentic, really more transferred grief from her love of her brother, who was the sole bright light in an abusive and dysfunctional family situation. Without the tragedy of his death, she might have continued on numb through her present existence, never bothered to explore what the book is spent exploring.

It's a very interesting book whose project I really like, but by the time we get to the project, the reader has spent 270 pages with an extremely detached narrator with a neo-noir tone whose unreliability is so intense as to inhibit the reader's immersion. It is eventually unclear whether or not the narrator has invented the events of the book in large part, whether her breaking point was in fact a mental break; this unreliability is provided by details about her mother's mental illness and systematic delusions. Whether this is all metaphorical—her time spent in nature, the arguable opposite of her life before the breaking point, as a refuge from a world she felt no attachment to—is an interesting question.

A lot about this protagonist was functionally identical to Authority's Control until the final reveals. I have the sense that this novel may have been crafted from castoffs from that series, which contributed to my sense of bewilderment as I read. In both cases has Vandermeer covered the guntoting grandpa who crosses lines, and the return home only to find things that draw the protagonist deeper into conspiracy. There was a time when I wondered whether the protagonist was inventing this cult or religion around Silvina, the way Control did about Ghost Bird. Chasing ghosts. A lot of chasing ghosts. Fortunately these are themes I absolutely love, which is how I got through a book that felt so samey in plot to another beloved book by the same author for such a large chunk of the book.

3.5 because this book has stuck in my brain, and I have been thinking about it when not reading, despite that (due to life circumstances more than the book itself) it took me six weeks to get through. The narration style was unique enough, and the eventual reveals interesting enough, that I think I will want to return to this book, which together gives it an automatic B-. I don't think my understanding of this book is formed enough to offer many more thoughts than that until reread, which I think is potentially a flaw of the book, along with the alienating writing style.