Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience

Certainly an interesting book- the writing is dark and interesting.
Thank you to both publishers and NetGalley for gifting me the book

Wow - what a journey. This book and its narrator reminded me a little bit of To Kill a Mockingbird - a naive young girl who learns lots of lessons about life in their small town. I found the writing beautiful, and the setting claustrophobic, hot, and grimy. I really could imagine myself in this setting. I did, however, struggle with understanding the time period that this book was set, but that's just a small gripe. I recommend this for fans of modern American literary fiction.

Wow! Really haunting, dark, mysterious and I found myself thinking about it when I wasn't reading. I devoured most of it over a weekend as I wanted to keep reading 'just one more page'!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me read an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This book is incredibly sad... but in a way that just makes you want to absorb as much of it as you possibly can. It is very clear that this book is written by a poet, every sentence is finessed to within an inch of it's life, but the result is a really beautiful, moving and heartbreaking story.

Cindy doesn't have much in life; all but abandoned by her mother, she's left at the will of her two brothers. Jude Vanderjohn, an affluent teen, goes missing, and Cindy seizes the opportunity to live a life she could only have imagined. Marilou is Everywhere is a book that makes you feel: whether sadness, unease at moral dilemmas, moved at times. A tale of loneliness and longing, it doesn't so much lead you to the conclusion but tells Cindy's story and leaves the reader to find their own way through their feelings.

I don't really know how to review this book because I am still not sure how I feel about it? I think the synopsis of this definitely misled me as well as the title. Maybe I expected something too different from what I got and that's why I feel a bit - loopy, I guess?
While I liked the writing style, I also can't say anything about it in particular. It was all a bit run of the mill for me. Still open to read more from this author, though.

If I were permitted a single word to describe Marilou is Everywhere, it would be ‘weird’. Nothing more eloquent springs to mind. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t find some semblance of enjoyment amongst its pages, but the premise was so strange and the timeline so indistinct that I found it impossible to love.

Sarah Elaine Smith, I’m informed in the ‘About the Author’ section that precedes the novel, holds MFAs in Fiction and Poetry. I commend anyone with a Masters in anything, having completed one myself, but here, it seems a little contrived. Smith’s writing is lyrical and poetic, but occasionally to the point where it loses narrative cohesion. Reading this book is like trying to follow a path that even the forger cannot fathom. It picks up in unexpected places, misses out parts that I would have thought contributed to the flow of the novel and ultimately, left me confused and constantly skipping back several pages to figure out what I missed. Only to find that, in actuality, I had missed nothing.

The thing that most people comment on is the incidence of Marilou, or, the lack thereof. Mentioned twice, perhaps three times throughout the entire course of the book; I was under the distinct impression that Marilou was, in fact, nowhere.

The novel follows Cindy, a hapless fourteen year old who assimilates herself into the life left behind by Jude. From the outset of the narrative, we are made aware that Cindy is an unwitting victim of abject poverty and domestic dysfunction. This purposeful affectation of pity was lost on me - I felt such an extreme disconnect from Cindy that any attempt at sympathy or reconciliation was futile.

Jude, the mixed race girl whose disappearance acts as a catalyst for the entire narrative is, to me, an extraneous character. Jude is no more or less than a plot device, included only as a provider of opportunity for Cindy to step into her life. Marilou is Everywhere has all of the pre-requisites for an astounding read, but unfortunately, it falls short. It could delve further into the conversation about racial disparity in small-town America, as opposed to its mere mention of institutional racism within law enforcement. It could engage more directly with the failings of the education system in identifying domestic abuse. It could even comment more thoroughly on the emotional and psychological effects of said abuse. It is mentioned only in passing nearly half way through the novel. Blink and you’ll miss it.

The issue with this style of writing is the particularity it demands from its reader. It may sound pretty, but unless every nuance and implication is understood inherently through the process of reading, pretty is all it is and will ever be. Alongside this lack of clarity in favour of aestheticism lies a sense of artificiality. We are supposed to believe that Cindy is uneducated, and yet we are also supposed to believe that Cindy’s internal monologue is unequivocally sophisticated and grandiloquent.

There were so many moments in this book where I paused just to wonder why they were present, and it is these moments I find myself remembering now, still with the same sense of antipathy that marked my initial reaction.

I gave Marilou is Everywhere three stars, and only because I don’t deal in halves.

A weird, strange quirky tale of Cindy/Jude and the lives she changes between depending of who she is and where she is. It was written well, there were a lot of different characters to follow. I like it but it is not something that I would read again.
Thank you for the ARC

Marilou is Everywhere is an offbeat, weird and at time slightly disturbing story. Cindy Stoat is a 14 year old girl with an often absent mother, living with her two older brothers, Virgil and Clinton. When Virgil’s ex-girlfriend Jude Vanderjohn vanishes after a camping trip, Jude’s mother Bernadette falls apart. Virgil checks in on Bernadette, and soon Cindy is accompanying him on his daily trips to check in on Bernadette who spends most of her time in an alcoholic haze and often mistakes Cindy for Jude. Somewhere along the way Cindy slips into Jude’s place. Having Bernadette thinking and treating her as her daughter Jude is a weird, ethereal experience. It’s moments in time where Jude isn’t lost and Cindy is loved. There’s a level of stability for Cindy and Bernadette in the midst of this highly dysfunctional and tenuous situation which can’t last forever...

Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, the story was a little hard to follow at times. All of the characters were mostly strange, I’m not sure any of them were likeable. These might sound like a negatives but I loved it! It was an absolutely great debut novel from author Sarah Elaine Smith and I’m super excited to see what she writes next!

I found the synopsis of this book very misleading and inaccurate. There were so many characters it was hard to get invested in any of them and a lot of the information we were given just wasn't necessary to the story. Not that there was much of a story, it didn't seem to go anywhere and i didn't enjoy this at all.

Often people say that fiction is the closest you can get to experiencing life through someone else's point of view. Marilou is Everywhere is a book that delivers on this idea.

That said, I'm not 100% sure that I liked this novel. I admired the writing but the story felt a bit nothing. The dark hints the narrator gives about changing things if she was given a chance build a promise of unease that ends up going mainly unfulfilled.

I'll still look forward to reading more of this author's work and I'm glad to have read this offbeat novel.

Thanks to the publisher and netgalley for a copy in exchange for an honest review

When Jude disappears, 14-year old Cindy escapes her own family's poverty and slips into the missing teen's life. Suddenly Cindy is surrounded by books, art, and a startling sense of possibility. In her borrowed life she finds herself accepting the confused love of a mother who is constitutionally incapable of grasping what has happened to her real daughter.

Holy Guacamole - when I read this short abstract I was immediately intrigued.

Marilou is Everywhere is one of the most original books I have read in a long time. It's a great mix between incredibly poetic language and very graphic descriptions of poverty.

This original coming of age story is about the insatiable longing to escape our own lives and the lengths we are willing to go in order to do so - and I can only recommend reading it.

Fourteen-year-old Cindy is troubled, raised almost feral with her two brothers and absent mother. When she sees an opportunity for a different life, she takes it in the most bizarre way possible.

Author Sarah Elaine Smith never moralizes in Marilou is Everywhere; she understands the flaws that make everyone — especially those who have been beaten down the world — human. However, there were very few times where any of the characters are likeable - which is the author's point - but not one for me.

I loved this book so much - the writing was compelling but with a dreamlike quality. I will definitely be recommending it!

Let’s start at the very beginning which, I am told, is a very good place to start. There’s no Marilou in this novel. “Marilou” is, in fact, the nickname of Jude Vanderjohn, a teenager of colour who lives with her eccentric, alcoholic and possibly sick mother Bernadette in a predominantly white, rural outpost in Appalachia. Also, Marilou isn’t “everywhere”. She is nowhere… or, rather, nowhere to be found. At the heart of the novel is the mystery of Jude’s disappearance following a camping trip gone wrong.

The story is narrated by Cindy Stoat, the younger sister of Jude’s ex-boyfriend Virgil. Cindy is herself an outcast, raised by a single mother who comes and goes and has now, apparently, left for good, ostensibly “for work reasons”. Left to her own devices with two older brothers, and taking advantage of Bernadette’s confused state of mind, she steps into the shoes of the missing teenager and slowly morphs in a new composite version of Cindy/Jude.

The “missing person trope” has become a genre unto itself, cutting across other longer-establish genres, from plot-driven page-turning thrillers to subtler, philosophical works. Marilou is Everywhere is the debut novel of poet Sarah Elaine Smith, and hers is a decidedly “literary” approach (not my favourite adjective, but I’ll go for that as a working description). The novel’s language is rich and musical and even when it is portraying the numbing boredom of small-town life, it does so in pregnant metaphors. And this is certainly one of this work’s strengths. Yet, depending on your point of view, it might also be its main weakness. Cindy is supposed to be a school drop-out and, despite the fact that her days with Bernadette have taught her about Tintoretto, soy sauce and Nina Simone (unexpectedly turning her into the “family intellectual”), her narrative voice still sounds suspiciously like that of a poet-turned-novelist rather than a disturbed teenager.

This novel should also come with a warning that it is a real downer. Both Jude and Cindy are, ultimately, outsiders desperate to escape their background, their families and even their bodies. And this does not make for jolly reading. But even pain can be beautifully conveyed, and Smith manages to do this brilliantly. Isn’t great literature often uncomfortable after all?

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Books for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

If the gods of writing were to appoint an earthly muse it would be Sarah Elaine Smith.

Oh my, where to start? This is one of the most hauntingly beautiful novels I have ever read. Whilst Sarah Elaine Smith has an almost ethereal turn of phrase, this belies the real substance of this rather unusual coming of age novel. "Marilou is Everywhere" is all heart, and exhibits by the author not only a deep love of humanity, but an almost otherworldly understanding of the complexities of the human condition. The focal point of the story is Cindy, a girl who lives on the margins of society in poverty-stricken rural America, with her brothers Virgil and Clinton. When Jude Vanderjohn, aka 'Marilou' disappears - a girl much admired by Cindy, Cindy finds her way to the home of Marilou's mother, the unhinged Bernadette, and becomes a replacement for the missing girl. If this seems like an unlikely premise for a novel, let me assure you it is not. In the context of the wonderfully drawn main protagonists it is a logical extension of their characters and part of a broader message about how life is what we make it, not preordained by some design. Which is why, as Smith writes it, there is nothing sinister in Cindy becoming Marilou - because at the heart of this changeling-like event is not only the pragmatism involved in survival, but also imperfect, yet equally powerful love. There are undoubtedly some uncomfortable themes in this book: rural poverty, sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug use, neglect, but these are handled with a deft touch by Smith. Whilst these are never trivialised in the narrative, there is also a touch of humour that sparkles like fresh fallen snow on the bleakness of a barren landscape devoid of hope. You won't find any poverty-porn in "Marilou is Everywhere". This a far more nuanced novel than that. Smith does not pity her wonderfully imagined characters. Instead she offers them hope, and by extension in us, the possibility of redemption.

Sublime and beautiful.

If one's not turned off by the hazy, heavy way plot proceeds, they're in for a treat; unique, complex, brutal and beautiful, this novel possesses a stilted way of presenting this story.

2.5 rounded down

Whether you enjoy Marilou is Everywhere will probably hinge on your propensity for this kind of prose - quite MFA-y, lots of description and a tilt towards what I'd describe as "flowery" writing. There also isn't a whole lot of plot, so if you're not a fan of that then probably steer clear.

That said, Smith's debut novel is a quick and breezy read, despite what could be quite heavy content. When teenage Jude Vanderjohn goes missing on a trip with friends, Cindy (a young girl whose brother dated Jude) visits Jude's mother - and when Jude's mother mistakes Cindy for her daughter, Cindy keeps up the pretense.

Where this novel excels is the claustrophobic, musty setting of rural America. Many reviewers have compared Smith's writing to Lauren Groff - so if you're a fan of her this might be worth checking out, however unfortunately this was a bit of a miss for this reader.

Marilou is Everywhere by Sarah Elaine Smith is a novel about neglected teenager Cindy who moves in with the alcoholic mother of a missing girl.