Review of Katherine Inskip, “In This Life and the Next”, Luna Station Quarterly 32 (2017): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
I struggle with second-person POV so much. I can totally understand why an author would choose it — I’ve had my own fair share of writing something that simply need to be written in that voice — but as a reader I find it so often off-putting, because if the “you” is “me”, then the narrator has gotten something totally wrong, this isn’t me, this isn’t my story.
So I always start a second-person POV story with a healthy dose of trepidation. Maybe this one will be the one where the “you” is in fact me.
It wasn’t, oh, it wasn’t. But when I realize who the narrator is, and who she is talking to…I’ll forgive the author pretty much anything, because there is no way this story could’ve been written in anything but second-person POV, and it’s brilliant.
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