This book is kind of a nesting doll of allegories and allegorical literature. The main character is a novelist who starts off writing a romance between a typing teacher and student that sharply turns in the middle of her writing into a magical realist horror.

★★☆☆☆ This is like a John Green novel but with less of a thesis and more annoyingly obvious it’s an oblivious man writing how he thinks young women think/feel/act.

★★☆☆☆ A book recounting a series of crimes and insidious acts committed by a middle-school teacher and her students against one another. Story begins with the apparent drowning of the teacher's four-year-old daughter, and each character gets their own POV section recounting what happened and what happened next in their perspective.

★★★☆☆ I excepted something a little more atmospheric. As it turns out, this is just a quaint slice-of-life sort of thing where things just sort of quietly happen and there’s not a ton of plot or tension or set-up or pay-off.