Yellow by Amy Pence is a vivid, often whimsical coming-of-age novel that pulls you straight into the interior world of Eliza, a young girl navigating the confusion, curiosity, and quiet heartbreak of growing up. Set in Louisiana in 1973, the story is steeped in sensory details: humid air, childhood obsessions, and cultural touchstones like POW/MIA bracelets and little green army men. At the center of it all is a strange yellow blob of slime mold in Eliza’s yard, a fixation that lingers long after it vanishes and becomes an emotional thread woven through her entire life. Pence absolutely nails the period details, grounding Eliza’s perspective in a way that feels both intimate and deeply relatable.

As Eliza grows older and becomes Z, questions of gender and sexuality add new layers of complexity. The tone of the novel evolves alongside Z’s life. What begins with the whimsy and curiosity of childhood slowly gives way to something heavier and more mundane, eventually shifting into near–mystery thriller territory. Each stage of life brings a tonal change in Pence's writing, which is ambitious, though the transitions can feel a bit disconnected. The lyrical rhythm of the first third of the book fades, and with it comes a sense of disjointedness that can create emotional distance from Z as the story progresses. While the return of whimsy at the end is welcome, it isn’t quite enough to fully unify the novel’s many phases. This is my only gripe.

At its heart, Yellow is a meditation on time, loss, survival, and the long shadow of trauma. It explores love, lust, friendship, and the struggle to find catharsis in a life shaped by both personal and political upheaval. Z is haunted by unresolved relationships and the ghosts of family and lovers, searching for a way to find closure. Somehow, everything circles back to that yellow blob in the yard—an unexpected but powerful piece of connective tissue in Z’s journey toward healing. Readers should be aware that the novel includes graphic and sometimes traumatic depictions, so it’s best approached with care. Overall, Yellow is an ambitious, detail-rich novel that captures the messiness of a whole life, imperfections and all.

I’ve read this straight through.

Amy Pence’s Yellow, whose title comes from a slime mold on a log in a Louisiana back yard, starts in 1973; I was very young then but I remember the Watergate hearings and how intently my father watched the national news. I remember looking through a telescope hoping I could see Skylab. For a reader who doesn’t remember the early 1970s, the opening pages of Yellow may seem stranger and more singular than they did for me. The childhood chapters where we see Eliza and Clem and Frank going barefoot into bookstores or Eliza, Janice, and Cheryl’s beds crammed at right angles into a too-small shared room evoke an era of three-channels television and the mysterious and unsettling elements of the novel are a bit mollified by how grounded the reader is by the setting. But there is a moment early on where the reader realizes that Pence will pull no punches in spite of the occasionally vexing insertion of the Watergate timelines and Skylab information. That moment is both jarring and, for a lot of us I suspect also relatable; the feeling a Gen X reader may get is one of agreement: we never learned to say no until we passed a moment where saying it wouldn’t have worked anyway.

And that moment - a trigger, a jagged edge - is what kept me reading in spite of my impatience with some coy and self-gratified prose in the first 40 or so pages: the story turns there from what felt like the fiction I recall from workshops where we were all vying for something - what it was I don’t think we could have said but we wanted it anyway - and sets it on its edge, spins the narrator like a dime. Something silvery and slick when it is still becomes a dusty pewter as it moves, and that’s the point at which Yellow began moving for me.

We see the timelapse of Z going from Louisiana to Barnard College to Katrina; from Katrina to another moment that pins the spinning time in place, still on its edge. Z discovers and occludes, her story is a moon in racing clouds: is she racing or are we? We slip through the pandemic like dust motes. This is a novel that you’ll ask questions, a novel with eyes. As it goes on, we gradually come unmoored from time as we approach the present.

Evocative, locative, and hand-me-down time jolt into true-crime, science lab, N95 time. The whole lifts like a firework, opens up, grows more of itself; the conclusion will include itself in a collection of novels that I think about from time to time.

I’m an aphantasic synesthete and as I read I sometimes get an auditory and olfactory idea of what I imagine a reader who can see stuff in their mind experiences. In Yellow I could smell popsicles and cigarettes, the subway and old Levis, and hear Joe Strummer and typewriters, the voice of oldtimey news guys and the way someone somewhere in Manhattan always seemed to be having trouble starting a car. I could feel the dry slippage of card catalogs, the brassy static of revolving doors, the way the soles of your feet would go dead dancing slightly drunk in bald-soled docs.

Yellow is a growth. It’s a slime, it’s alien and gross, a colony, a hive-mind, a they on a log. It’s also a lot more than that.

Eliza, or Z, is enough older than I am that I am impressed by her: she is one of the big girls we watched as the little kids, fascinated by their variegation. Having her as the center around which the rest of the novel spins is so neatly done that I felt throughout like I was watching someone ahead of me, a little envious, a little afraid.

I don’t know anything about Amy Pence other than her [It] Incandescent which is a gorgeous hurricane of poetry and prose with Emily Dickinson at the eye, and she may be older or younger than I imagine her from reading Yellow. If she is younger than I imagine, she has captured the years I was a child impeccably.

In spite of my reluctance I washed up on a warm sand of kinship for this novel. Do I think the prose was overwrought and salute-the-judges in places? Absolutely. Do I love it in spite of that? Yes, resoundingly. I highly recommend Yellow to readers who enjoy both what is tediously called “experimental” fiction and novels that conjure a particular timeframe, and to anyone who reads poetry secretly hoping for a plot.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.