"My mother's light, cool hands patted protective liquid on my face. She fastened a wide-brim hat beneath my chin, tying the ribbons in a firm knot, loops aligned. Such pains she'd taken, for the little I'd since become."


Did I like this book? No. Did I enjoy the story? No. A more apt question would be; was I morbidly engrossed in a glorifying savage plot? Yes, I was.

The story comes in three perspectives: Will, Phoebe, and John Lear. Will and Phoebe are in love, but perhaps not the star crossed lovers kind, mainly their relationship is unhealthy, toxic and obsessive. John Lear is a thoroughly religious man: one with a hidden past who uses his body and mind as a conduit for God; leading disciples through the median that is his influence. John Lear has set his sights on persuading Phoebe to join his movement, and with sorrow of her own to bear, she falls in love with the idea of being healed by God, drifting from her relationship with Will.

The Incendiaries pronounces itself as a really formal account, rather than a story, allowing a shade of realism that may otherwise have been able to safely hide behind the labelling of fiction. I couldn't really get into the story until around 70% through, where I finally gleaned what was going on. The plot wasn't very clear, with the focus on lots of agonisingly melancholy introspection, rather than gluing the story together.

I had to really focus on each word, sentence, paragraph, otherwise I was threatened with losing my bearings and becoming completely confused as to what was going on. The narrative sharply flashes unnecessarily back and forth between the past and the present, and it took a while to become accustomed as to what was supposed to be happening when.

The alternating perspectives were told in both first and third person, all at different points. This was far too confusing for me to be an asset in any way to the story, but I persevered for the sake of closure.

The prose is choppy, brutal, and dark. "One corpse was found stashed in ice, his missing parts marked with human teeth." Little windows of horror kept opening up in what seemed like random points in the story, letting the reader see into the reality that was the North Korean slave camps that came from John's perspective, jaggedly placed within the story, so as a reader, I felt tense and uncomfortable, wondering when and if the next unpleasantness would become apparent.

This was juxtaposed with the two woven lives of Will and Phoebe, stricken with their own tragedies, yet falling back together again, and again. The two sharp worlds, joining together in such a candid tale, left me feeling unsettled. If that was R.O. Kwon's intentions, then the author has done a really great job.

The story didn't really grip me, but I was intrigued as to where it would go, the ending was full of unpleasant surprises that I'm sure will keep me awake tonight.

Thank you to Net Galley for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I'm very sorry to say I did not finish this book. I feel terrible for giving this response, but in reality, had I bought this for myself and got to this stage, I wouldn't continue then and feel this is a true representation of my feelings. I have made it to ~52% and will not be completing it.
My main issue was with the point of views. I was so confused throughout each chapter, when one name was at the top of the chapter and yet it didn't seem consistent in it being their point of view. Was it simply just a chapter focusing on them? I'm still unsure who the narrator is. There were parts that read like a first person POV but it was just a character telling the narrator something, but the lack of speech marks or defined layout made it so confusing to keep up with, and maybe I was just being slow or missing the point of it but it took away from any joy of reading it because I spent to long trying to figure out what was going on with what characters.
I also didn't care much for any character. I couldn't see any real reason for Phoebe and Will to be together, there seemed to be very little explanation for him jetting off to Beijing and it was down played to this really little thing, and I just wasn't following it very well. Also, not much had happened for being half way in, the pace was slow, there was no action or suspense or ever intruig, and the whole thing fell a bit flat.
I half felt obliged to carry on, but not finishing it, as I said, is accurate of what I would have done in real life, and there are too many other books to read.

The Incendiaries may appear to be a short novel but it packs a powerful punch in those pages. It's a tale of jealousy, religion, fanaticism, and love. The story of Will, Phoebe, and a man called John Leal, Kwon explores a man's loss of faith which has led to some life-changing decisions and his dismay as he watches the woman he loves being drawn deeper and deeper into a religious group named Jejah, by a charismatic man who may or may not be telling the complete truth about his past. As Will falls deeper in love with Phoebe, she, in turn, starts abandoning her friends, her studies, and Will.

The Incendiaries focuses on the character of Will, with Phoebe and John appearing as what feels like support characters. We get to know Will extremely well, about his life before Edwards, his mother's illness and get to explore the reasoning behind his loss of faith. Phoebe remains an enigmatic figure, and although we learn about significant events in her childhood, we don't know much about her as an adult and especially why she is so drawn to John Leal and his cult-like group. John himself remains a shadowy figure throughout the story, looming in the background and appearing at times when Will is feeling at his most vulnerable in his relationship with Phoebe. He claims to be a former prisoner of North Korea, goes barefoot all the time (Kwon's quite graphic description of the state of his feet turned my stomach! But I have a bit of a phobia about going barefoot...) and is charismatic to the point that people flock to him, take part in his group's initiation rites and become distraught if they're cast aside by him.

It becomes clear that the void left by his lack of faith and the absence of God in his life, Will is using Phoebe to fill that hole and his love becomes an obsession rather quickly. It was interesting to this happen as Will himself doesn't really realize this until the end but it's clear to Phoebe's friends, especially the colorful Julian who tells Phoebe to stay away from him.

Ultimately, R.O. Kwon has written a compelling and engrossing story that plays on the tropes of an obsessed man, whose memory is unreliable - at his own admission, and the sections featuring Phoebe could be either her actual memories or Will trying to fill in the blanks, trying to make sense of everything that happens, and the group's descent into extreme violence. Her ability to play with perspective is partially what makes this book so readable, and I think the most important thing for me was being able to read it in one go. It allowed me to immerse myself fully in Will's story, to try and understand exactly what was going on with Will. I liked that Phoebe was never fully fleshed out and that we never got to know her side of the story if we see her sections of the book as being Will's memories rather than her own thoughts. Kwon's writing is wonderful, her ability to draw the reader in from the first page is remarkable for a debut author and such a short novel. Some of her descriptions were so powerful that you can feel yourself in the actual presence of these characters, rather than just picturing them, and I think The Incendiaries fully deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it.

I first heard about "The Incendiaries" from US vloggers, and was really interested in the hype it received. I was very pleased when I was able to received an ARC from Netgalley to read it prior to its release in UK. It lived up to my expectations. The story follows Phoebe Lin, a Korean American student at a prestigious university and Will, who is far less well-off, on scholarship and newly transferred from a Bible college, after he lost his faith. Phoebe, driven by guilt and grief, is drawn into a religious group, Jejah, founded by John Leal, a former student with a mysterious past.. A terrible act of violence is committed and Will is trying to discover what pushed Phoebe towards an extremist organisation, "Incendiaries" is a novel in three voices about love, grief and obsession. Although not very likeable, Phoebe is an interesting character. Her pursuit of absolution in faith is depicted in a convincing (and chilling) way. It was also a beautifully written book, and I found myself being drawn into its narrative. However, I would have liked to see more insights into the cult that drew Phoebe in, and to have had a more definite ending. Overall, I thought it was a really good debut novel and I will be looking forward to reading more by R.O.Kwon.





The book is told by three main character's voices - Leal's chapters are told in third person, Will's in first and Pheobe's

I’ve been wanting to read The Incendiaries ever since it first came onto my radar. I’m fascinated by the psychology involved in cults and the people who are seduced by them so the premise of this book really appealed to me. I must confess after reading it that it’s not quite what I expected. Rather than being the thriller type book I was expecting – it was a more analytical look at the characters involved and the boundaries of faith, power and passion.
At first the book appears to follow three perspectives: Will, Phoebe and John Leal. However as the story progresses it becomes apparent that Phoebe’s narrative is actually Will’s explanation of what he perceived Phoebe’s thoughts and actions to be. This is a little confusing at first but it’s a fascinating angle to tell the story from as it adds a great deal of doubt to be cast upon what Will is telling the reader. The chapters don’t really follow one single thread but everything does eventually connect and becomes slightly more clear although doesn’t wrap everything up in a neat little bow which feels much more realistic.
I found the characters hugely intriguing but not particularly likeable. This is not a problem for me at least because I often find ambiguous characters far more interesting to try and figure out – as was the case here. Another thing which really stood out in The Incendiaries is the beautiful quality of the writing. Pretty much every sentence was full of lyrical language which made reading it a joy. Kwon is clearly a talented writer and I will definitely be reading her next piece of work.
This is a short book but I wouldn’t say it’s a quick read. It requires thought throughout every page but I think it’s a hugely worthwhile read. The Incendiaries is an intense commentary on how religion can become obsessive or even fanatical and how similar it can be to becoming completely entranced by a person. I would definitely recommend it as a book that is both original and compelling.

A cult in an American college, a student who was an Evangelical Christian but has lost his faith, another student who feels responsible for her mother's death, add in a bit of angst and terrorism and you have 'The Incendaries'.

It all sounds great, and up to a certain point it was. For some reason it did not quite hang together for me. Maybe there were too many narrators? Or maybe there were too many lies and questions hanging in the air.

I was frustrated by the John Leal character. Did he really know Phoebe's father? Did those things in Korea really happen to him? Again after the terrorist event I was confused by Will's trip to Phoebe's father's church - was is shut up because he was in league with John Leal? Was is shut because the father was grief stricken? Was it ever open? Was John Leal her father? My mind is working overtime!

I so wanted this to be great but somehow it just misses, but I think R O Kwon has the potential to write a real humdinger.

I have many thoughts about this book and I am very conflicted about my feelings and my rating. As is customary in such cases, here are my thoughts, first in list form than more elaborated:

Pros:

prose
the interesting way R. O. Kwon plays with perspective
the subversion of tropes

Cons:

plot
characters

This book is told from three perspectives: Will, who has lost his faith in god and his plan for his life, his girlfriend Phoebe, who lost her faith in her piano talent and her mother, and John, the enigmatic cult leader whose cult Phoebe starts following. Or, more exactly, the story is told from these perspectives as Will imagines them. I loved the way this worked out and I love the extra layer of interpretation this opened up. Phoebe is for all intents and purposes Will's manic pixie dream girl - but R. O. Kwon never lets the reader forget that he construct her in a way that suits himself, without much regard to the person she really is. I cannot help but wonder if this construction of Phoebe and the subsequent unfolding of events isn't a direct reaction to a plethora of novels who treat their female characters only as a foil for the male character to develop.

There is something mesmerizing in the way R. O. Kwon's language flows. She has a way of structuring her sentences that enthralled me. I was hooked with her writing style from the very first chapters. Whatever problems I had with this book, her language is incredibly strong in a way that I found unique.

But even though the novels hits many high points for me and I am so very glad to have read it (and cannot wait for more people to read it so we can talk about my more spoilery thoughts), ultimately it did not quite work for me. I found the plot and the character development to be fairly weak as well as not that original. Especially the last part of the book made me mostly impatient with Will and made me question if his characterisation was all that successful. His obsession with Phoebe (obviously meant to be a replacement for his lost faith), while believable in the beginning, became less so as time went on.

I also think that the book would have worked better without the added perspective of John (or more, what Will imagined John to think like), for me these chapters, while short, always took me right out of the flow. But nevertheless, R. O. Kwon is a major talent and I cannot wait to see what she does next.

Book Review - ‘The Incendiaries’ by R. O. Kwon ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thank you to NetGalley, Little Brown Book Group UK and R. O. Kwon for the chance to read an arc of this novel.

Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet at a party at prestigious Edwards University. Phoebe is a charismatic girl who seems to know everyone and lives an exciting and charmed life. But she’s hiding a secret; she feels responsible for the recent death of her mother. Will is an outsider, a late transfer to the University from Bible college. He’s out of place amongst the riches and confidence of his fellow students, and desperately trying to hide his humble upbringing and struggle to pay the bills. He’s also head over heels in love with Phoebe.

As their relationship blossoms, Phoebe finds herself involved a secretive religious group run by John Leal, a mysterious but alluring man tied to her North Korean birthplace and family. As she attempts to reconcile her guilt and anguish she is lured deeper into the cult while Will, trying to come to terms with his lost faith and past indoctrination, tries to save her before it’s too late.

First of all I absolutely loved this book. It is so beautifully written that I often found myself stopping to reread a particularly sublime sentence or paragraph. The subject matter is heavy a times but R. O Kwon perfectly entwines this with a tale of self discovery and modern day love story. The backstory of John Leal and reading how he entices Phoebe into his extremist cult humanises them so that at least from the perspective of Phoebe, you understand how she got to this point and why she happily follows all of his edicts. The choice to focus on a Christian extremist group, and not Muslim, was a wise move as it highlights fundamentality of a different nature to what we currently hear mostly in the media, and reminds us that any religion or ideal can be twisted until it resembles something vile.

Will's desperation to save Phoebe from John Leal’s grasp as she's sucked deeper into the cult and away from him is agonising. She is blind to what she's involved in and you feel an increasing sense of hopelessness and inevitability as you reach the story’s climax.

The Incendiaries is an emotive, thought provoking book. Suddenly the terrorists aren't a stranger or the beaten down immigrant with nothing but hatred for the government. They're the beautiful girl with a life you dream about, the friend you laugh with, your lover. It could even be you.

Out September 6th.

Just finished - The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Synopsis : A story of love, loss, faith and violence as a young couple at an elite university get pulled into the control of a cult leader.
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Review : Fascinating characters and writing, check. Intriguing and twisty plot, check. Cults, check. I’m sold! 👍🏻 This book is as beautiful as it is devastating. Kwon’s writing is magical and she can paint such a vivid picture in so few words. I don’t want to give too much away as this is such a small book but I loved how you felt one way about the characters, Will and Phoebe, then (for me) everything was turned on its head half way through. She writes so lyrically about faith, family and love and all the forms that can take; when love is beautiful and nourishing and when it’s ugly and evil. If you are looking for a short novel that will pack an emotional and moral punch, pick up The Incendiaries when it’s released in the U.K. in hardback on 6th September.
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Thank you to @netgalley, @viragopress and @littlebrown for the advanced copy for review.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Little Brown Book Group for giving me the opportunity to read ‘The Incendiaries by R.O.Kwon in exchange for my honest unbiased review.

After hearing so much about this book and waiting so long for read it - it certainly did not disappoint.
It was been beautifully written with a certain aspect of cleverness.
The story jumps off the page and there is a lot of movement within the story , it jumps from light to dark. The story is written from the aspect of 3 main characters Phoebe, will and John point of view- how they become involved/linked in a cult which is lead by John Leal - who had been captured and sent to a gulag in North Korea.
I particularly enjoyed the short chapters and that each chapter was based on each characters their actions,thoughts . This style of writing kept me engaged into the story and also built the suspense with what was going to happen next.

Highly recommended
Cannot wait to see what R.O.Kwon writes next.

The Incendiaries is a complex, compulsive novel about faith, love, and extremism in a prestigious university. Will Kendall—awkward scholarship student who has transferred from Bible college—meets Phoebe Lin, a glamorous Korean American girl who is secretly racked with guilt about her mother's death. Will falls in love with Phoebe, but Phoebe is being drawn into the orbit of John Leal, a former student with a complex past involving North Korea. Leal has started a Christian group and Phoebe is looking for something to belief in. Will starts to see that the group is a cult with fundamentalist concerns, but his attempts to save Phoebe expose his own flaws and issues with his own Christian past.

At its heart, The Incendiaries is a love story about extremism told by an unreliable narrator. Will and Phoebe's relationship is depicted in a careful, engrossing way, showing the unhealthiness and the way that Will purposefully ignores this. The unreliable narration is key, showing how Will puts his faith in Phoebe and how he blinds himself to his own actions. Though the novel is quite short, the fundamentalist cult is a slow burner, giving it extra ominousness. Alongside this, R. O. Kwon focuses on sexual assault on university campuses, abortion protests, and North Korean prisoners, making the book a complex one that shows how these issues do not exist in a vacuum.

At the start, The Incendiaries feels very similar to The Secret History, with a lying narrator dealing with bigger things at a prestigious university. However, what it turns into is something else, a powerful novel that shows flawed people and dangerous issues set mostly within the bounds of the campus.

I'd heard so much amazing stuff about this book and I wasn't disappointed! I flew through it in one day.

I'm still struggling to figure out how to put into words what I read, I was blown away. It's ultimately a book about love and loss, faith and violence... and cults. I found this book fascinating. It was beautifully written, and the short chapters added to the building tension of the plot.

Will recommend to everyone I know!

An interesting plot, told from the POVs of Phoebe, a South Korean young woman, her boyfriend Will and the mysterious John Leal who may (or may not) have been in a North Korean gulag who becomes a cult leader on a US college campus.

The narrative is lead from Will’s POV which is the most interesting part of the novel. The chapters from the other two characters are brief and disjointed, which means the reader feels like a bystander to the main events of the novel.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advance copy.

The setting: Edwards College, in the fictional town of Noxhurst on the River Hudson, in an unspecified year some time after 2001. The main characters: John Leal, once a prisoner at a North Korean gulag, now the charismatic leader of a Christian cult of hand-picked followers; Phoebe, a lapsed Korean-American piano prodigy and a student with a penchant for party-going who, unexpectedly, falls under Leal’s spell; Will Kendall, her boyfriend, who has enrolled at Edwards from Bible college after losing his strong Evangelical faith.

The novel turns the narrative on its head, presenting us at the very start with the most momentous episode in the story, a terrorist attack in which Phoebe is clearly implicated. We’re told that “Buildings fell. People died.” Will, shocked, tries to understand what could have led to all this.

As plots go, there’s little else of import apart from what the blurbs and the above brief summary reveals. In some aspects, the novel is stingy with narrative details. To be honest, the underlying themes of “The Incendiaries” are not exactly new, either. The “student on the fringe” who doubles as narrator is a recurring trope in college fiction, as is the “crush on the popular girl” – think of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”, or “The Virgins” by Pamela Erens. Even the central image of the “God-shaped hole”, which Will repeats through the narrative as a symbol of his loss of faith, is not exactly original – attributed to Salman Rushdie, it’s an evocative metaphor which has since been regularly quoted and misquoted.

Yet, the praise for this debut is justified. Indeed, I felt that Kwon has managed to assemble a bunch of commonplaces and turn them into a gripping, thought-provoking book which is also, palpably, “hers”.

Take the deceptively simple structure of the narrative. The novel is split into forty short chapters, in which the narrative voice alternates between Will, Phoebe and Leal, making the novel compulsively readable. Soon, however, we realise that, in fact, there is but one narrator – Will – who, in an exercise of imaginative empathy, tries to give voice to the other characters. This might explain why the chapters on the enigmatic Leal are the shortest. Phoebe’s are partly based on a private journal which Will gets his hands on and are, as a result, longer and more detailed. But can we really trust Phoebe’s narrative as mediated through her lover?

Will, in fact, is the classic unreliable narrator. He has a love-hate relationship with the faith he has lost. He still thirsts for it, and yet is ashamed of his evangelising years and, by association, of his upbringing and his past. Will has no compunction about lying as a means to reinventing himself. He admits at one stage I wish I hadn’t lied to you Phoebe, but with anyone else, if the option came up, I’d do it again. If Will takes pains to hide his past, can we be sure about his portrait of Phoebe? Are his motives as honourable as he makes them out to be? These are just a few the many questions which Kwon tantalisingly raises whilst leaving to us to try to answer.

More challengingly, these doubts do not refer only to aspects of the narrative, but also to the underlying themes. Jejah, Leal’s group is first presented is just another Christian religious gathering and only later is it described named as a “cult”. Will, wary of religion and pained at his loss of faith, does not really distinguish between ‘mainstream’ religious movements and ‘cults’ – his anger seems to be equally directed against the two. But the novel, at the same time, does imply that there is a difference, albeit one which can, at times, be tenuous indeed. Significantly, in “The Incendiaries”, there seems to be an underlying comparison between love and religion/faith, with the extremism of cults finding a parallel in the excessive possessiveness which can taint first loves. The final chapters even suggest that Phoebe might be a personification of the faith Will has lost – a reading which would add a symbolical layer to the novel.

Kwon has stated that she was raised as a Roman Catholic and that, like Will, she is still, despite herself, grieving for the beliefs she has since abandoned – perhaps giving credence to Cordelia’s (rueful?) statement in “Brideshead Revisited” that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic”. The Incendiaries can, in fact, be read as a meditation on faith – its comforts and its challenges, its fruits and its dangers, its allure and its loss. At the heart of this novel is a cult with a warped expression of religion. yet I have no qualms about considering “The Incendiaries” a religious novel. Nor about recommending it to fellow readers, whether believers, non-believers or in-between.

A debut novel to remember, R.O. Kwon’s study of the extremization of a young college student in America is a believable and chilling examination of modern society.

The narrative is subtle and cleverly done, shifting between the three main protagonists; what emerges is the story of Will Kendall, a student at an elite American college and his love-affair with Phoebe Lin, a Korean-American who gets involved with a group called Jejah, a cult led by the enigmatic John Leal. As the book progresses and events start to spiral, the truth becomes more elusive as Will tries to understand and piece together the events that have led up to his ex-girlfriend being involved in acts of domestic terrorism that have killed 5 innocent girls.

The book is about faith and losing faith, and how we seek answers in an ever-increasingly complex world. It is about privilege and outsiders (this looking through a ‘glass wall’, as the narrative says at one point, recalls Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby or Tartt’s Secret History). For a relatively short novel Kwon has packed a lot of ideas into the book, and what especially struck me was the confident way the narrative is handled, leaving ambiguities and open-ended questions. There are variations of truth – what you might believe, what you might recreate from a version of events – as Will tries to understand what has happened. But in a book that ultimately looks at the intangible questions of belief and faith – and finding meaning in life – these are left, it seems to me, deliberately unanswered. An excellent debut novel by a very promising new voice.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of the book in return for an honest and unbiased review.)

Thanks to NetGalley and to Grace Vincent, on behalf of Virago, Little Brown Book Group UK, for providing me an ARC copy of this book that I freely chose to review. Thanks also for the opportunity to take part in the blog tour for the launch of the novel, the first book published by R.O. Kwon, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
This novel describes the attempts by one of its protagonists, Will Kendall, of making sense and understanding the events that have led to his girlfriend’s, Phoebe Lin, participation in a horrific event. As often happens in novels with a narrator (or several), no matter what the story is about, the book often ends up becoming a search for understanding and meaning, not only of the events that form the plot but also of the actual narrator. Why is s/he telling that particular story? And why is s/he telling that story in that particular way? This novel is no different, although the manner the story is told can, at times, work as a smokescreen, and we don’t know exactly who is telling what, and how accurate he or she might be.
On the surface, the novel is divided into chapters, each one headed by one of three characters, John Leal (this one written in the third person and always quite brief), Phoebe (written in the first person), and Will, also written in the first person. At first, it’s possible to imagine that Phoebe’s chapters have been written by her, but later, we notice intrusions of another narrator, a narrator trying to imagine what she might have said, or to transcribe what she had said, or what she was possibly thinking or feeling at certain times. As we read this book, that is quite short notwithstanding the seriousness of the subjects it deals in, we come to realise that the whole novel is narrated by Will, who, after the fact, is trying to make sense of what happened, by collecting information and remembering things, and also by imagining what might have gone on when he was not present. He acknowledges he might be a pretty unreliable narrator, and that is true, for a variety of reasons, some of which he might be more aware than others.
The novel is about faith, about finding it, losing it, and using it as a way to atone and to find meaning, but also as a way to manipulate others. It is about love, that can be another aspect of faith, and they seem to go hand in hand in Will’s case. He discovered his Christian faith in high school, in part as a refuge from his terrible family life, and lost it when it did not live up to his expectations (God did not give him a sign when he asked for one). He moved out of Bible School and into Edwards, and there he met Phoebe, a girl fighting her own demons, a very private person who did not share her thoughts or guilt with anybody. Will falls in love with her and transfers his faith and obsession onto her. But she is also unknowable, at least to the degree he wishes her to be open and understandable for him, and she becomes involved in something that gives meaning to her life, but he cannot truly become a part of. He abandoned his faith, but he seems less likely and able to do so with his belief in her.
The novel is also about identity. The three main characters, and many others that appear in the book do not seem to fully fit in anywhere, and try different behaviours and identities for size. Will invents a wealthy family who’ve lost it all, to fit into the new college better; Phoebe hides details of her past and her wealth, and is Korean but knows hardly anything about it and John Leal… Well, it’s difficult to know, as we only get Will’s point of view of him, but he might, or might not, have totally invented a truly traumatic past to convince the members of what becomes his cult, to follow him.
The language used varies, depending on what we are reading. The dialogue reflects the different characters and voices, whilst the narrator uses sometimes very beautiful and poetic language that would fit in with the character (somebody who had been proselytizing, who was used to reading the Bible, and who tried to be the best scholar not to be found out). Also, he tends to use that language when remembering what his girlfriend had told him or imagining what John Leal might have said as if he remembered her as more beautiful, more eloquent, and more transcendent than anybody else. This is a book of characters (or of a character and his imaginings and the personas he creates for others he has known) and not a page-turner driven by plot. The story is fascinating and horrifying but we know from early on (if not the details, we have an inkling of the kind of thing that will happen) where we are going, and it’s not so much the where, but the how, that is important. The book describes well —through the different characters— student life, the nature of friendships in college, and some other serious subjects are hinted at but not explored in detail (a girl makes an accusation of rape, and she is not the only victim of such crime, there is prejudice, mental illness, drug use, abortion…).
I read some reviews that felt the description or the blurb were misleading, as it leads them to expect a thriller, and the book is anything but. I am not sure if there must have been an earlier version of the blurb, but just in case, no, this book is not a thriller. It’s a very subjective book where we come to realise we have spent most of the time inside of the head of one single character. Nonetheless, it offers fascinating insights into faith, the nature of obsession, and what can drive people to follow a cult and to become strangers to themselves and to those they love.
The ending is left open (if we accept the narrator’s point of view, although there is an option of closure if we don’t) and I was impressed by one of the longest acknowledgements I’ve ever read. It hints not only of a grateful writer attentive to detail but also of a book which has undergone a long process and many transformations before getting into our hands.
A couple of examples of the poetic language in the book:
Punch-stained red cups split underfoot, opening into plastic petals. Palms open, she levitated both hands.
The nephilim at hand, radiant galaxies pirouetting at God’s command. Faith lifted mountains. Miracles. Healings.
Not a light or easy read, but a book for those eager to find a new voice and to explore issues of faith, love, identity. Oh, and for those who love an unreliable narrator. A first book of what promises to be a long and fascinating literary career.

This was a conflicting read for me, on one hand i found it incredibly uncomfortable but on the other i genuinely believe i'll think about this book and its characters for the next few months.
It was very slow paced and I found the characters to be deeply unlikable so really didn't enjoy reading this but i think that might have been the point? If i had enjoyed reading about grooming people to join cults in North Korea i might be the one with the issue you know?

This for me was one of those reads that was written really well but i found i was having to force myself to continue reading. Again i think my issue was the characters, but as it was a short read it wasn't too bad overall. The writing style however was beautiful and pensive and ought to be commended.

Will is a student and his girlfriend Phoebe becomes involved in a cult who perform acts of terrorism.

A short book and a fast read but the writing style is fuzzy and imprecise so that the whole thing has a foggy, opaque feel. As others have said, the publisher blurb talks this up and gives away the whole plot, such as it is. The idea is good but the book feels oddly detached, more cerebral than the material warrants.

What is smart, though, is telling the whole thing through Will's eyes, even the sections marked Phoebe and John Leal, so that we see his imaginings and fantasisings after the end.

This is slimmer and narrower in scope than the blurb promises but for all its over-heated writing, it has <I>something</i> that kept me reading to the end. Just manage your expectations with this one...