Catfish Rolling

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I especially admire the way the author was able to describe the out of bounds areas so well that I could easily visualise what the characters were seeing and hearing. Now Sora and her scientist father live close to zones that have long been abandoned, have grown wild and nature is reclaiming what was once hers but these places are also dangerous.

I had quite a hard time digesting the philosophical and scientific arguments and discussions of Sora’s personal monologues. So don't decide whether or not to read this book based on my review since we all experience this differently. It feels like a mix of soft sci-fi, magic realism, and Japanese mythology (some of it new to me), and it is a slower paced story with descriptive prose, focusing more on Sora’s feelings and longings of her family, growing up a hafu (half Japanese) in Japan, romantic feelings (she’s bi), and what time actually is. Considering this is a fantasy book containing a lot of science, it’s not surprising that Catfish Rolling is more of a feeling than something that can be explained. Catfish Rolling takes many contradictory stories and ideas and seamlessly weaves them into a single tale.I loved how Sora's relationships (with her father, her missing mother, and her guy friend) are messy and complicated. Generational gaps, family dynamics and a young-adult protagonist navigating desolate and haunted landscapes, mindscapes and combinations of those two. When Leto awakes from her death, the enigmatic Melantho reveals her destiny: to kill the last prince of Ithaca and destroy the curse. I found the ideas on time, and the whole concept of the fast and slow time zones, fascinating - especially how time feels like it flows differently in certain places (often in nature), for different people, and during grief.

Green’s experience of being banned from visiting a church school in the UK because he is gay and the current debate about sex education in the classroom make this all the more timely and important. I love how the last portion leaves what happened up to interpretation - was it a metaphor, an imagining that helped mend her grief, or did she really lift the rock? There are themes of grief (and all its stages), growth (as both a young person experiencing trauma and grief), and living in liminal spaces where time moves faster, slower, or normally. Some of the Japanese people she encounters just assume that she's a foreigner who doesn't speak Japanese. Identity, family and loss are key themes running throughout the novel where myth, fantasy and scientific discovery collide.

Emotions and loss transcend time, and this young girl only sees both as being beyond anyone's control.