Whew! This is a hard one to read. Hard to review too, so this is gonna be disjointed.

I found Allison's style a little difficult to get into at first, but it hooked me after a bit. The tragedy of it all is gripping and spellbinding once it begins in earnest. Allison does a great job of creating a Southern atmosphere. Bastard is slow and a bit dreamlike in the seasons, the cooking and cleaning, the storytelling and gossiping, punctuated by moments of shock and awe and violence. That slow exposition is what opens the book and it continues for a while (hence difficult to get into at first).

Appreciated that

all the aunts and uncles tried their best but none quite had a modern sensibility on what to do with a trauma survivor. There was a lot of "not your fault, never your fault" but there was also a bit, sometimes, of "why are you being so difficult?"

.

"Hard to read" for two reasons: one, all of the tragedy, which is certainly affecting but just as certainly not fun, and for me necessitated some breaks. Two, the prose style, which was technically proficient but wasn't my favorite. I'm trying to decide if I'm justified in that or just a bit of a baby, used to reading books which indulge me. Bastard never fights for your attention. You can bear witness or you can turn away. I was bored sometimes, when it felt like it had been too long since something happened. But my attention span..

God! What the fuck am I trying to say. Bastard was interesting a lot, really. Not just the

child abuse

scenes, although I do think it's fair to say those were the most compelling parts of the books. In her observations, and her emotional life, Bone is an interesting character. She's perceptive and young and scared and smart, self-assured but questioning her place and her people and her path forward. It was a privilege to spend time with her. I think that's all true — and also, excepting truly a handful of sequences, every page or two my eyes would start to glaze over, skipping past a sentence or a paragraph, necessitating me twenty seconds later to think "wait, where was I?"

That doesn't happen to me with every Real and Grown-up book that I read! There was something about Allison's prose that I found particularly slippery. And I don't have any textual evidence here, but I think that it's the same thing that makes the humid, interminable South feel real in Bastard. So, technically proficient, but not exactly for me.

Somewhere around 80% or 85%, even though it was my bedtime, I stayed up to keep reading and find out what happened.

Occasionally beautiful like poetry, something which I'm realizing happens in all great books. Exemplified in some of the quotes below, but there were many other occasions.



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Here were some quotes that struck me:
> "Her 'Jesus' is even better. Everybody says 'Jesus' so much round here, you forget sometimes who he was supposed to be, but Mama rations her Jesuses. You hear her say 'Jesus' the way she does and you know for sure that Jesus was a real person, that little boy used to bring doves back to life, that quiet young man never known to curse or fornicate. You can just see him—a man, like your daddy maybe, aged by the sins of the world, a life sacrificed for you personally."
159-60

> The hunger, the lust, and the yearning were palpable. I understood that hunger as I understood nothing else, though I could not tell if what I truly hungered for was God or love or absolution. Salvation was complicated.
148

> Aunt Alma swore all gospel singers were drunks, but right then it didn't matter to me. If it was whiskey backstage or tongue-kissing in the dressing room, whatever it took to make that juice was necessary, was fine.
136

>

Aunt Alma laughed carelessly. I pulled away from her and went after Reese. It was mushy. Mama and Daddy Glen always hugging and rubbing on each other, but it was powerful too. Sex. What that what Daddy Glen had been doing to me in the parking lot? Was it what I had started doing to myself whenever I was alone in the afternoon? I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone set the dry stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire.

63

> Mama froze, one hand still lifted to reach toward the bread basket. Her face was like a photograph, black-and-white, her eyes enormous dark shadows and her skin bleached in that instant to a paper gloss, her open mouth stunned and gaping.
69