I about 20% into this and was just not connecting. I don’t know if it’s me or what but if I pick it back up I will come back and revise my review.

No idea what I read and I think I hated it. It felt pretentious and a little too try hard for me. Cool concept but the story wasn't flushed out enough.

Joy Williams is one of the best contemporary writers. Her writing is borderline mystical yet rooted in every day experience - the horrors of being alive. Harrow's plot is difficult to explain but I found myself engaged by the child narrator and there are moments that are genuinely funny and comedic. Thank you for the galley.

I was so looking forward to this one. Dystopian novels are usually right up my alley, but Harrow just didn’t deliver. From what I’ve seen from rave reviews, the writing style for this one is similar to her other novels. However, the style seemed clunky and nothing seemed to connect. If I’m being honest, if this is how her earlier works are, I’m surprised she won the Pulitzer in 2001.

Book 1 was a hot mess. Random scene changes with so many characters and nothing seemed to connect. Book 2 was getting better, the plot seemed to be tying together but the characters were insufferable.

Also, what’s a dystopian novel without science? From the bit I read, there was little science and little mention of how America plunged in this dystopia. It was all theory.

She’s obviously a well beloved author, but she’s not for me.

Honesty I feel like this book was above my level of intellect. I didn’t finish it because 1) I couldn’t relate to the character & 2) I was confused on the plot.

This book is very trippy and non sequitur in its storytelling. I plan to finish it but for right now I'm not in the right mood. The writing is very good and easy to read, and the main character is interesting. I am curious to learn more about the post apocalyptic situation they're living in. I'm getting hints of Station Eleven but it's also very different from that.

A moving novel filled to the brim with recognizable themes, cautions, and mysterious questions of trust. In an apocalyptic world where everything is fragmented into belief systems, Harrow delivers the real in unreal. I particularly will be pondering the narrative decision to favor "authentic" man-made objects over the opposite. I also expected a climate change novel, which has certainly run its unfortunate course, and was pleasantly surprised to find the allegory not high on the priority list. Harrow reads like a contemporary classic and I expect to see it on those TikTok videos once its out in paperback.

After finishing Harrow by Joy Williams I immediately looked to others to try and make some sense of what I had just read and felt extremely validated by The New York Times's blunt remark in the first paragraph of their review “what the hell was that?”.

The cast of characters are a circus side show of darkly humorous intellects living in an apocalyptic future (one of the funniest moments involved reflection on killing all of the world’s poets). They speak in lengthy philosophical soliloquies that are oftentimes totally aside from anything else going on, but that harbor some nice quotable takeaways about human nature and climate change.

The likeable elements of the writing and lack of plot brought to mind Oryx and Crake and a dystopian, almost magical realism take on a girl venturing out on her own to “find the meaning of it all”. There are also biblical themes (purgatory-always a fascinating topic, saviors, etc) that I appreciated, despite finding challenging to fully decipher. The unlikeable parts (mainly the utter confusion at times and long moments of rambling dialogue) gave me Thomas Pynchon vibes (🙄).

So idk take that all as you will. A complicated and challenging first read to start off 2022.

"We knew nothing of the outside world's affairs, nor could we imagine what we were being groomed for. Perhaps the ruthless and painful requirements of nothing."

Harrow is about... well, um, it's a bit tricky for me to summarize the plot because it was kind of all over the place. Khristen is a teen whose mother believes she's destined for greatness because she momentarily died as a baby. Or, at least that's what her mother believes - there's no proof Khristen actually died for a hot second. But moving on... Khristen gets sent to a boarding school that her mother believes is extraordinary but in reality turns out to be rather decrepit. It gets to the point the school gets shut down due to lack of funding, and so Khristen attempts to find her mother since she's still a kid in need of a guardian, after all. The last she'd heard, her mother had gone to a retreat... but when Khristen shows up at the place where she thinks her mother may be, she finds out it's really a falling down motel/hotel around a lake known as Big Girl that houses several elderly folks who all want to rid the world of various people and things they find to be corrupt. I could keep going and describe a birthday cake depicting a murder scene, a 10-year-old who speaks as if he's 45 and subsequently becomes a child judge, and a party house that may or may not have a lot of horses living in the surrounding lot, but no matter how much I describe here, it won't make any more sense than it did when I read about it.

When I read the description of Harrow as a post-apocalyptic tale of a teen navigating the world on her own, I was intrigued. When the description included the fact that it was written in a beautiful yet odd way, I was sold. I tend to like books that are a little weird - Phillip K. Dick and Chuck Palahniuk are two of my favorite authors. And yet Harrow just didn't do it for me. It felt like Williams put a bunch of potential plot points into a bowl, shook it for good measure, plucked out a few, and subsequently tried to write a book about what she'd pulled from the bowl. It felt like it was weird for the sake of being weird and nothing more.

"There was a game they played. Once I was a... and now I am a... How they loved that game, the little ones. Once I was a crayon but now I am a six o'clock at night."

Does that line make any sense? No, no it doesn't. And yet, is that how the whole book is written? Yes, yes it is.

Either I am too intelligent to appreciate how nonsensical this book is or I'm too stupid to fully comprehend it. But either way, I can't say I particularly enjoyed it.

Harrow begins realistically and feels a bit like a John Irving offering. I was engaged and hopeful. Then it takes a darker turn, and a journey ensues. At this point I was sensing something like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or The Book of Eli. I was still engaged. When the apocalyptic tale turned inward and exploded into other characters and their individual absurdities, it lost me. I no longer had much interest or connection and just waited for it to be over.

Thank you to Joy Williams, Knopf Publishing, and NetGalley for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Without a doubt, one of the strangest books I've ever read. Both hilarious and sad, with some of the most clever lines I've read in a long time. It's hilarious in that the situations are bizarre. For instance, a mom can't bring herself to tell her little boy that his father just murdered his grandfather, so she had the cake decorator paint the murder scene on the boy's birthday cake. The cake decorator does this by doing a rendition of the oil painting, Saturn Devouring His Children.

If that's not strange enough for you, there's plenty more where that came from.

The sadness comes in because humans have completely destroyed nature and most people either don't care or they see it as a victory over the earth. Harrow is full of peculiar people doing odd things, partly due to the destruction of the earth, but also because nobody seems to have a purpose anymore except for some dotty elderly eco-warriors who waited a little too long to do anything.

Go into this book with the understanding that it's not like most books. Read it knowing that things will be strange and there's no coming back from that. Read it with a sense of humor.

Thanks to Netgalley for allowing me to read and review Harrow.

This book wasn’t for me. A bit in line with the current novels of Helen Oyeyemi, this book reads as an absurdist experiment with post-apocalyptic overtones and seeming non sequiturs at every turn. It took me a bit of effort to follow and I ultimately found that I couldn’t.

This book was just not for me. I expected a heroes journey across a desolate landscape, with commentary on climate, activism and political hijinks. instead, this book was a rambling take on people's own foolhardy tactics to survive. The satire did not land, nor were any of the characters memorable.

⭐⭐💫 / 2.5 stars

I really wanted to love this as the synopsis was very appealing to me; however, due to the complex and often perplexing writing I found it to be more of a chore than an enjoyment to read.

There are moments of beautiful prose and humor with a message that is unmistakably needed but for the life of me I don't know that I could accurately give my own synopsis of this book as most of the time I felt I had no clue what was going on.

In all honesty if I had not been given an early review copy through NetGalley I am sure I would have DNF'd it pretty early on and that is something that I very rarely do.

I know others have loved it, especially fans of Joy Williams and her previous works but unfortunately this book just wasn't for me.

This was my first Joy Williams novel and given what has been said about her other works I would try another.

It pains me to say this (Williams is the author of one of my favorite short stories of all time), but while I appreciated the premise of this book, I'm not sure I'm sold on how Williams gets us there. The premise really is compelling: the end times of all things after humans have pushed the environment beyond the tipping point and Earth's utter indifference to mankind's demise. The post-nature world that Williams creates captures a real sense of cosmic and ecological horror, and provides a dark vision of where we're headed that eclipses much of Williams' wit. Surrealism and allegory abound, and there's any number of ways to unpack the text, but around the halfway point it all became a bit of word salad for me that wasn't actually saying anything while giving the (false) impression of saying a whole lot.

This is book is rather difficult to review - the right reader will adore it, but many will find it offputting. It has beautiful language and a wry sense of humor, but after a compelling first third or so gets so bogged down in a befuddling sense of surrealism that I, personally, lost the thread. I don't dislike difficult books, but I lost the emotional connection from the beginning of the book and so found the rest to be a bit of a slog.

A new Joy Williams novel!
Happy to include it in the September instalment of Novel Encounters, my column highlighting the month's top fiction for Zed, Zoomer magazine’s reading and books section.
Full review feature at link.

3.5.
Harrow reads like a fictional b-side to her excellent nonfiction work, Ill Nature. Joy Williams is a masterful writer and so that this novel feels so inexplicable most of the time may be my deficiency as a reader. There's great prose here and Williams' well-crafted dialogue and wit is also here, but I was so confounded so much of the time. In a world where confusion and uncertainty is already so vomit-inducing, I wanted to love Harrow, but I just don't know how to.

Harrow is so many things at once in a tiny little package. It's dark and funny and searing in it's examination of society and human nature. The world Khristen inhabits is completely invented but at times also seems like a very spot on version of real life. The world Williams has created is very different from our own, but at the same time feels just one step removed from life. Like an alternate future waiting just around a series of corners.

I couldn't put down Harrow and read through it in a day. The story is propulsive and compelling and has such a refreshing streak of dry humor that I really appreciated. I honestly went into this book with no knowledge of the author and now I'm looking forward to exploring her other titles.

Harrow is weird and twisted and bleak but in the absolute best way possible and I'll be recommending it often. It stands out from the crowd as a truly original work not only in theme but in tone and voice.

This book was surprising to me. First off, I think the synopsis accurately described the plot of the book. I just don’t think it describes how we are going to get there. Joy Williams has what I will call very literary and advanced writing and I wasn’t ready for it.

The way Williams jumps through dialogue is extremely thought provoking and infuriating. I would say (without really knowing) the purpose of her writing style is to challenge the dynamic of the conversation and expose an underlying tone. For instance, characters might be having a deep conversation and someone will say something shallow and unmoving to unnerve you (that could be completely wrong, but it how I felt while reading).

For me, this story line was interesting and a good idea. I was infuriated by Khristen’s mom and confused by the chain of thoughts many of the characters had. I left the book still wondering who was mentally sane and who wasn’t. I think as far as the writing style, I just wasn’t ready for it. I think this one needs a lot of time given to it to breakdown and analyze. If you have read Williams past work, you will love this one. The story is all there and very good.