Review by Booklist Review
A novelist goes to the desert in order to write "the desert section" of her next book, and also maybe take a break from her father's ICU bedside--a break she equally needs and regrets. Hospitable hotel receptionist Jethra sends the woman on a hike where she discovers a giant cactus, wounded in such a way that she can climb inside it and witness her father as a boy. On a subsequent visit, she gets to see her husband, hale despite the mysterious, debilitating illness he suffers from in real time. This cactus, understandably, has a pull. Instead of heading home at the end of her trip, she turns back to find it again, with no cell service, not enough water, and no one knowing where she is. In this wholly trippy, wise, and compassionate story about grief, Broder (Milk Fed, 2021) brings on laughs and a lump in the throat, making it all look easy, as her poetic prose and well-honed pages zoom by and her narrator struggles to be in an impossible here.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the infectious and dreamy latest from Broder (Milk Fed), a Los Angeles woman finds new ways to deal with anxiety and depression after discovering a fantastical giant cactus in the California desert. The unnamed narrator, a 40-something married novelist coping with her father's recent car accident and his continued stay in the ICU, takes a solo road trip for some relief. She checks into a Best Western hotel in Death Valley, Calif., telling herself the excursion will also help inspire her novel in progress, which she expects to feature a desert-based epiphany. While hiking on a trail near the hotel, she sees a towering cactus and passes through a portal on its surface. Inside, she encounters a five-year-old version of her father and comforts him. It's a funhouse warping of the care she misses from her dad, which she hasn't had since she was a child. Later, in between successive hikes to the cactus, she has brief FaceTime calls with her father in the hospital and with her husband, and continues to feel distant from both men. During the fourth hike, she gets lost and learns to summon her survival instincts. Despite the novel's intense interiority, Broder's narrator is consistently companionable; the story works because she enjoys talking to herself, a personality quirk Broder finds clever ways to convey ("I am overextended and cannot fulfill your request at this time. Best, me," she imagines writing to herself as an away message). Readers ought not to miss this magical tale of survival. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert Co. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Broder (Milk Fed) has written a weird and wacky treatise on grief. The protagonist is an author trying to complete her newest novel while dealing with serious family issues. Her husband has been debilitated by an undiagnosed illness for years; her father was in a terrible car accident several months earlier but has cheated death twice while remaining mostly unresponsive in the ICU; her mother deals with it all by adhering to strict superstitions. The protagonist hits the road, leaving Los Angeles, and heads to the desert, where she is delighted to find a room in her favorite hotel chain, Best Western. Written in the first person, the novel's first half details the protagonist's journey to this point. The second half is a stream of consciousness of her visit to the desert, hallucinating an enormous cactus and going inside it; very much an escape from reality. The humor is bleak, the metaphors strong, and her grief palpable. The meandering story finally arrives at a somewhat surprising, almost heartfelt ending. VERDICT Buy for demand only. For the literary sophisticate; read-alikes include the works of Banana Yoshimoto and Jeffrey Eugenides.--Stacy Alesi
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A writer whose father is dying escapes to the desert to face (or avoid) her grief and ends up with much more than she bargained for. A woman wanders in the California desert. She hikes through scrub, shadowy dunes, the "orchestral quiet" of the rocks, plants, and animal life. Back in Los Angeles, her father is in the intensive care unit, walking the knife's edge between life and death after a car accident. She's also left behind a disabled husband whose illness has complicated their marriage. As the woman walks, she contemplates the natural world, the ties that bind us to the ones we love, the nature of God. She watches lizards and rabbits; she talks to rocks. She comes to a fork in the trail: One route leads back to her life in LA; the other leads deep into the ruthless desert. Which will she take? If this all sounds a bit woo woo, a taste of Burning Man with a touch of Siddhartha, fear not: This is Broder, the poet, essayist, novelist, and author of some of Twitter's most viral bons mots as @sosadtoday. Her style mixes therapy-adjacent hyper-self-awareness, dark humor, and a jovially narcissistic approach to tragedy ("I am still the kind of the person who makes another person's coma all about me"). It is also, among all its other guises, a book about writing: The narrator is struggling with her novel-in-progress (about a woman with an ill husband and a dying father, natch) whose structure she cannot figure out. This is not a subtle book--the protagonist is very literally walking in the valley of the shadow of death--but it's as wise in its way as any spiritualism about vision quests or finding enlightenment. A 100 percent Broder take on grief and empathy: embodied but cerebral, hilarious but heart-wrenching. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
