This book stumped me. It’s a bit of an anomaly – a highly literary novel, a fable-come-to-life, a political commentary, a family saga, a love story. Frankly, I just don’t know what to make of it.

What compelled me to continue reading was the brilliance I saw in the author’s ability to write in metaphor and weave symbolism and myth throughout. Clearly, Tipahnie Yanique is an accomplished writer with prestigious poetry and literary awards to her credit.

Poetry is, after all, about telling a story without telling it directly – a way of speaking in metaphor, a way of dazzling with sparse words to conjure images and concepts that cause the reader to bend her own views of the commonplace (the language was, indeed, concise and not flowery). This poetic lace the author wove exceptionally well (and I will always be in awe of poets for this gift).

Yet… the story fell short for me, overall. Perhaps because there were so many things being said and symbolized – so many metaphors and myths – that I’m not sure of the story’s intent. The storyline, itself, seemed anorexic, yet also somehow seemed to lose itself in so many lessons: of politics, love, magic, and desire.

In this tale of two perilously beautiful sisters growing up on the US Virgin Islands from the mid 1900s to the 1970s, I wasn’t sure if the point of the story was to illustrate the danger of women being ‘owned’ by men. Or maybe it was to illustrate the varied types of history that swirl around us to make us who we are. Or perhaps it was a story about the natural desire for freedom, and the oppression that faces humanity in so many ways (from the book: ““…Besides, an old maid and a free woman might be the same dangerous witchlike thing. It was just a matter of choosing the correct way to view things.”) Or maybe it was about the power of story and parables, as the book says, “… It is how they interpret the story that will make all the difference.” Or a love story.

To me, the novel just didn’t have a strong enough story “core” to effectively anchor all of those metaphors and symbols (and characters and themes) into something unputdownable.

This opinion could be, perhaps, my reaction to other elements of the author’s style. The story is told with much foretelling. You will know the upcoming collisions and difficulties in advance because the author forecasts everything that will happen through the point of view of a character, later in life, looking back on the story of her childhood. Stylistically, this method of forecasting future events instead of letting them unfold didn’t really compel me to continue reading.

As well, the book is filled with point-of-view and tense shifts, even within singular chapters. Toward the end of the book, a new style appears whereby a character interjects as if he is talking right to the reader (“May I interject” says one character. Another time he says, “Listen close.") These techniques often threw me off kilter, though I suspect they may be the very reason this book is likely to go on to acclaim – for its edgy literary-ness.

Beyond that, it should be warned that a recurring theme (and probably the most prevalent to me) is incest. I’m still perplexed and unsure if the author was trying to imply the prevalence of incest on the small islands or …? But it is no exaggeration to say that nearly every male character in this book had an attraction to the beauty of small girls.

I guess my quibble, if there is one – despite my deep admiration for the literary display (the author illustrates fabulous use of the double entendre for the daughter, Youme’s name, -- nicknamed “Me.”) – is that I didn’t know what this book was ‘about’ and didn’t quite connect in the ways I hoped to with the characters.

I suspect there were a lot of things, so brilliant in metaphor and symbol, that they went right over my head. Maybe, in the end, this book was too smart for me. And that’s okay. This novel offers excellent commentary on American politics and the taking of the Virgin Islands. It’s a story of men disappearing and running away from women. And women running away from men; it’s about the pull and tug of attraction and repulsion between the sexes. Or is it?

For those who adore highly literary fiction (where nothing is quite as it seems), this might be your favorite read this year.

I won this uncorrected e-galley from the publisher.