Brittany's Reviews > Blurry

How I Came to Read This Book: I did a bit of self-research on the best graphic novels of 2025 and this one popped up. I borrowed it from the library.

The Plot: This is a Russian nesting doll of a story (in fact, it cannily references that very concept) about the little ripple effects of our interactions with each other than can inform other futures. Starting with, simply, a man who has been invited to his (sort of) estranged brother's wedding and is torn between two shirts, prompting him to run into a woman who apparently went to middle school with him. This woman recounts a story of engaging with a former coworker at a restaurant, who himself was a former figure model, and taught her the lessons of forcing change upon oneself, a lesson indirectly imparted on him from the art teacher that taught the figure drawing class he posed for. Said teacher was suffering because the woman he was having an affair with forced him to change his life without his say so, herself inspired by a moment in her past when she felt like killing herself over a failed relationship, only to cross paths with an author full of self-loathing and doubt as she recounted her surprising path to publishing success, across two planes. An author who was somewhat driven to write from her encounters with another writer, with possibly predatory intentions, that seemed to be imparting his will on another female writerly type (who, *spoiler alert* is actually the wife-to-be of the guy in the first story). And said female writerly type recounts the moments that led her to become a comparative literature major, as opposed to a creative writer, or a philosopher, or a child psychologist, as she's working part-time as a nanny for a film producer. And it's that film producer who indirectly connects a lot of these threads together in a full circle way, dovetailing all the way back up the chain to our first guy, who's just trying to pick out a shirt.

The Good & The Bad: This book just pulls you along, plain and simple. It took me a moment to realize how it worked, and when you were transitioning from one character's story to the next, but once I got into it, it was hard *not* to keep slipping along in each of their tales. The book worked for me on two levels then; I found each individual story pretty engrossing (some more than others - and, I'd argue, the author would feel similarly based on how much time he spends in each story), but I also found the way you drive into the heart of the story and then crawl back out of it really magical too. The weird little ways these stories intersect, and how they're able to resolve themselves independently, but also influenced by the story (or stories) you've just read. It's a neat, subtle trick.

The artwork is pretty straightforward here for the most part - classic cartoonist, devoid of colour. It's also probably the most starkly "real" of all the graphic novels I've read. There's a fair bit of nudity and sex involved. But that's also what made it great; these felt like little vignettes into people's lives. Ordinary people, that is.

Two things I didn't love: There's flashes back to a relatively meaningless storyline from the beginning; involving our "guy buying a shirt's" wife (girlfriend?) and meeting up with a friend and debating between ice cream flavours. We keep on getting interjections back to this story throughout and I don't really get why, and the resolution to it doesn't really do anything either - it doesn't fit the flow of the rest of the book to be honest, and feels like it sits independently of the butterfly effect.

Also, the ending is kind of wackadoo. I mean, it's partially a cute, abstract nod to a meaningful part of Fiona's story, but it just kind of felt flat for me. I don't know what a perfect ending would have been, and I get the nod to negative space and finding meaning in the space between the stories as an overall metaphor, but it would have been nice to have some sort of more meaningful breakthrough for our first characters.

Of all the stories, I thought Christie's was the most interesting by far, but I also enjoyed Fiona's, and Malaa's, to a degree. Malaa surprised me in this idea that when you let danger come for you, you realize how much it's not really there at all. And Christie's thoughts were interesting too; the self-doubt, the questioning. Still, a very neat book overall.

The Bottom Line: An effortless read that takes you through the slippery ways in which we're all interconnected in a style that belies how difficult it is to actually make that a reality.

Anything Memorable?: Not especially.

2025 Book Challenge?: Book #7 in 2025.