After reading initial reviews, I have determined that this is a book I am not interested in reading at this time. If I decide to read it, I will leave a review then. Thank you for the opportunity.

I was expecting much better from this one. The original version (this was translated from Hebrew) has won awards and been highly praised. However, I just did not connect with it at all.

The premise was really good and there were parts of the story that I think gave the structure some excellent bones, but the execution was just not there for me. The writing was choppy and sometimes made absolutely no sense. The word usage was often a bit awkward and sentence structures did not feel right.

The organization of the plot caused me a lot of problems and I think kept me from bonding with any of the characters. Things moved so slowly that I just couldn't connect or be bothered to care. I wanted this to be a lot more than I was given. The outline version would still draw my interest now that I know how the book goes, the writing just didn't flesh the story out in a way that worked for me. I think it had promise, but just did not get there. Once again, maybe if I had been able to read it in the original language my experience would have been different.

* Disclaimer: I received a copy of this novel from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. *

The premise of this book is really good - a family with both deaf parents and deaf children living outside society, but then things go bad and the family is separated. My problem wasn't the story, which was good, but it was so hard to follow because the writing was very lyrical. Lyrical writing can be a good thing, but I wanted THE STORY, not poetry.

I had difficulty getting into the book. It may have just not been what I was looking for that week! The description and cover are very intriguing!

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This wonderful novel is like a modern fable. Two daughters, Lili and Dori, are deaf and raised by their deaf parents in a world of their own making. The kids are homeschooled and avoid the world of the hearing. Lili obsessively writes and Dori lives in her shadow. Their father collects and sells scrap metal and their beautiful mother has wild mood swings and mostly cares for her elaborate gardens. But the outside world has been circling the family for years and the day finally comes when the family is divided and long held secrets make it almost impossible to live the life they’ve created. Mostly told from Dori’s point of view, the story is really about the two sisters and the lifelong bond they have, even when separated by an ocean. This book is a great and caring world that’s fun to get lost in.

Aquarium is a book that is disturbing and full of truths. It is a hard to read story - it's hard to see things like this happen, it's hard to read about terrible people, terrible parents and sad lives.

BUT - Yaara Shehori writes poetry. This should be a book of poems. It's somewhat disconnected storywise - and was a bit hard to follow - but when looking at this objectively - it's beautiful poetry.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review.

Stars: 3.5
Worth the hype?: This author deserves more hype
Reading Pace: Medium
Reading Ease: Hard
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When I first heard of Aquarium, I was intrigued. The story follows two deaf sisters raised in seclusion in rural Israel by two deaf parents, and eventually separated the sisters are separated by “the institution.” It explores storytelling without sound and using one’s own language.
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I loved the sisters, Lili and Dori. I loved the writing, the author has a poetic way of stringing words together. I liked the story and the overall idea of Aquarium. However, I found it extremely difficult to follow in parts. The plot line jumps, skips, and goes backward without warning.
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Have a question about what happened or what is happening? Wait a few pages, or a few dozen pages, or perhaps until the end. Your confusion should be remedied eventually.
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But get to the end.
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The end of this book is worth every page that comes before it. The end blew me away. Surprised me. Shocked me. Made me pause, go back, and reread the ending.
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Aquarium depicts a cult-like world for the deaf community. Dori and Lili are two deaf sisters with parents that believe they need to live life away from the hearing community. However, when Dori is taken from her family, she has to learn how to adapt in a world that ins't made for her. So I ultimately decided that this book isn't for me, but I think a lot of people will love it. The writing is very dense and poetic, which isn't my usual cup of tea. I couldn't get through the book. However, I did really like the development of Lili and Dori. I appreciated their growth and learning to do things for themselves. The strain in their relationship felt very real. Also, I've never read a book about the deaf community, so I'm glad I branched out to this. I think there will be a lot of fans of this book!

Thank you to the author, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I loved the premise of this story, but I had a terrible time with this book. I found the writing style too meandering, convoluted and enigmatic - much of the time I was guessing at what the author was trying to say, and I kept having to go back and reread to have even a slight chance of understanding the narrative. Reaching the end was more of a relief at being done with it, than anything else.

This was beautiful. I adored the writing— every line was like poetry. I fell in love with this story and the characters. Highly recommend.

I received this from Netgalley.com.

Sisters Lili and Dori Ackerman are deaf and grow-up in a cult-like seclusion.

Although the topic was interesting, the writing style dragged me down.

2☆

TL;DR: Aquarium is an enigmatic coming-of-age story written in poetic prose and full of confusing, surprising, and unsettling relationships. My rating: 3 of 5 stars.

CW: ableism, child abuse/neglect, cults, toxic family relationships & estrangement

I wanted to love Aquarium. For one, it’s about sisters, and I LOVE a sister story. Two, I read very little literature featuring characters with disabilities, and despite the fact that the author herself is hearing, she appears to have done thorough research in deaf communities. Three, I’m striving to read more literature in translation (this story was originally written in Hebrew).

All in all, I think Aquarium’s plot and narration were too enigmatic and its prose too poetic for my personal tastes. The sisters--Lili and Dori--were not reliable narrators, which becomes especially clear by the end of the book when secondary characters are introduced as chapter narrators (after the majority of the book is limited to Lili and Dori’s perspectives). Early on, their unreliability was because they were young children. Dori was understandably confused when she (alone, without her sister) was removed from her childhood home, placed in a state institution, and fretted over by researchers, psychologists, and social workers. Later on in the book, their unreliability stems from the fact that as adults both women seem pretty stunted in their ability to relate interpersonally to others. This is perhaps unsurprising since they were raised in a maybe-cult (never outright confirmed). Their parents moved them as young girls onto a remote rural compound where their intense authoritative father amassed a following of apostles to his dogmatic creed that the hearing world was bad and to be rejected in all forms, including using assistive technology such as hearing aids and cochlear implants.

On top of the narration, the prose is very poetic, which was beautiful, but also frustrating for a reader like myself who’s partial to more direct writing.

I also had some feelings about the supporting male characters in the lives of Lili and Dori. In particular, Dori’s young adult romantic-ish partner, Anton, gave me some weird vibes. He listens with rapt, almost fetishistic, attention to Dori’s stories about her confusing and traumatic childhood, which she seems to dole out in snippets to prolong his romantic interest in her. When Dori leaves the custody of the state, she takes up panhandling in coffee shops, seemingly as a coping mechanism for reconciling her childhood with her identity as a hearing person. Anton is fascinated by this habit and gets voyeuristic enjoyment from accompanying her to watch. When Dori shows him letters she’s received from Lili, many unopened, he reads them and develops a somewhat obsessive parasocial relationship with her, the sister he’s never met. This book is full of relationships and characters that are interesting because they are confusing, or surprising, or unsettling.

I did really, really enjoy the descriptions of sign language and the characters’ code switching between their language and lip-reading and speaking.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for giving me advance access to this book in exchange for an honest review.

This tale of two challenged sisters starts well, introducing an unusual family and their even more unusual children, bound together by deafness and disability. However the author wants to follow this pair of siblings beyond childhood, and traces their conjoined then separate journeys over many opaque and confusing pages. The identities of the two start to blur, their choices are left unexplained, and a veil of interiorized mystery hangs over the storytelling. A novel founded in empathy but which loses its way.

The synopsis for this book pulled me in right away; I found it fascinating, and seemed to offer an intimate look at a world I knew nothing about - the world of the deaf. When I was offered the copy, I dove right in.

I found the book was full of beautiful writing but still inexplicably veered off my path of interest far too many times. I pushed through because of my appreciation for the author's (and translator's) delicate manipulation of the written word and its often creative plotting, but to no avail. I wasn't captured. Ultimately, this just didn't work for me. I will happily read anything else I can get my hands on by Shehori or, for that matter, translator Hasak-Lowy.

I am incredibly grateful to NetGalley and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for this opportunity to read this book. I hope you give it a try.

The writing in this book initially drew me in, but as time went on the story became lost on me a bit. I’m not sure if maybe this is just a case of lost in translation..I was intrigued by the story but at times it was just hard to follow and the writing became convoluted.

I received a copy of the book from Netgalley to review. Thank you for the opportunity
An interesting story which was well written and evocative, if a bit slow paced in parts.
A good read.

𝐈𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐞, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐢𝐫𝐥𝐬 𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐧’𝐭 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐚 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐭𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝.

I happened to read Aquarium while my hearing was slowly being restored, for the most part. Strange how books find their way to us in life with themes we can relate to. It truly is a fascinating coming of age story, written with a dash of the peculiar that I always look for in a novel. It begins with deaf sisters Lili and Dori Ackerman, two “disabled girls” who together complete a whole. Girls others see as defective, but they are not. They are not what they appear to be, they have their own secrets, even from each other. Sisters who talk in shadows on the walls with their hands. The sisters live in a parallel world that their father Alex and beautiful mother Anna (both deaf as well) have secured for their daughters. Theirs is a world that listens and sees differently from the rest, that scoffs at outside influence, that would only bring ruin and destruction with their ideas of what makes a person acceptable, that abhors any deviation of nature that doesn’t support their own ideal. Lili and Dori are the same shared story until they are divided by betrayal and the ‘civilized world’. The sisters begin as one but this charmed, wild childhood ends in division and from that point on both Dori and Lili no longer have each other to unearth meaning about the world outside or within them. Lili was always the ‘fact keeper’ and Dori the one who read the facts, the follower, how is she to separate fact from fiction without Lili’s guidance, her truth? It is a heartbreaking divide and it changes everything.

As the summary says, Alex collects and sells scrap metal, the girls basically supervise themselves, mother Anna is dedicated to the life she and Alex have chosen and ignore anything that doesn’t fall in line to their way of living. If Alex is a prophet, he has a purpose that neglects to account for his girls. There is a line about Alex’s brothers (the girl’s uncles) that stood out to me, “the other two were just along for the ride”, the same could be said of anyone in Alex’s orbit.

The writing is gorgeous, this is another read that had me highlighting passages like mad. Aquarium is a journey into our very identity and who are outside the sphere of our family. It is about the demands of our origins too, how we chose to fit in and if we are even given a choice to buck conventional attitudes, what it costs to do so. I wonder about the title too, it may be me reaching but fish in aquarium live in a universe of their own, they are also constantly observed though by those on the outside. There is a lot happening in this novel. Are the parents suspect? Is what they have chosen wrong? What happens if a shared story has holes in it? It’s hard to delve deeply into the thoughts this unique tale brought to my mind without giving away everything that occurs. That Alex and Anna have formed their own little community, shunning the hearing world and it’s ways, ‘the Ackerman family existed like weeds by the main road’ isn’t a problem in and of itself until their way of life spilled unto their neighbors. It is when the social worker arrives that, despite Lili and Dori’s parents preparations to appear ‘normal’, the house of cards collapses.

Yaara Shehori states this novel isn’t meant to represent the diverse deaf community. Though it’s fictional it is provocative. As I have mentioned, I had issues with my hearing recently, as I am watching my father losing his own, which makes me think really hard about how so called able-bodied people demand others fit into their world. Much as she isn’t speaking for said community, my little bout of hearing difficulty isn’t any sort of insight into people born deaf. Like anything else in life, we don’t really think about any of these things until we are faced with similar circumstances. It sounds funny coming from someone who raised an autistic son, but that doesn’t mean I have a clue about someone born deaf that wants to shun so called ‘cures’ or the hearing society anymore than I am an expert on what having autism feels like, only my son can answer that. Which, I must add, doesn’t speak for each individual’s experience with autism either. How we experience the world is unique, diverse and certainly this fictional tale asserts that truth. There truly are many worlds within our own. I think the wisest characters in the story aren’t Alex and Anna, but their beautiful daughters. I read Aquarium months ago and it has stayed on my mind since then. I was engrossed from the start and I loved the ending.

Yes, read it!

Publication Date: April 13, 2021

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

~3.5 stars

This book is beautifully written, but at some points felt a bit slow-moving and hard to follow.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the chance to read this book!

A very ambitious debut novel. The premise here is interesting. However, the plot is convoluted and confusing and only truly definitively explained (too point blankly?) on the final page.

Great idea and the synopsis sounded great. I don't know what happened but the writing style seemed convoluted and a bit boring. It was lost in the descriptions and I just didn't care to continue sadly. Thanks for the copy of the book.