Imagine, if you will, that James Joyce and Hunter S. Thompson had a love child, and that it was a girl, and that she was living in 1992, keeping a diary, and also, she had a personal vendetta against punctuation.
I learned about this book from my fellow author and friend, Roanna Flowers, during a conversation we were having about book cover design. She said she hadn’t read Kittentits yet, but she saw the cover and wanted it on a T-shirt. When I looked it up, I immediately concurred, then hopped onto my Libby app and found, to my great delight, that it was immediately available for download. I opted for the audiobook version, and I’m glad I did. Several reviews have noted that Wilson doesn’t use punctuation in this book, and I’m not about that life.
Kittentits is Holly Wilson’s debut, published by indie press Zando. If ever there was a case for indie presses, it’s this book. Because even a cursory glance at the Goodreads reviews will inform you that it is not a novel written for mass market consumption. That is, people either really love it or really hate it.
And that? Is my favorite kind of book.
I can’t really tell you what Kittentits is about, because it’s experiential. I mean, yes, it’s text-based, and there’s kind of a plot. Or, at least, a story that goes somewhere. We read alongside 10-year-old Molly and a cast of characters as they grapple with profound loss, which is experienced in some form or another by every single one of them. The narrative is a stream-of-consciousness carnival ride: weird, rickety, and sometimes terrifying in that it asks you to give up control, strap in, and sit close to feelings, language, and ideas most of us do our best to suppress on a daily basis.
However, if you’re looking for any kind of moral, intellectual, or spiritual imperative, or for a tidy ending that makes you feel smarter for having read it, you’re S.O.L. Wilson’s narrative is surreal, sometimes incoherent, often gratuitously crass. But just when you think she’s fucking with you, she swoops in with passages that make you realize there’s intentionality in every sentence, and the ending is, well, breathtaking in its emotionality.
This is the kind of book that sits in your oyster shell like a grain of sand, irritating your consciousness and asking you to do battle with your logical mind; to scrape the depths of your humanity and find connections that exist outside of your safely constructed sense of self.
Indeed, there’s a lot of pearl-clutching in the reviews I’ve read around Wilson’s deployment of slurs and topics considered unfit for a 10-year-old narrator. I have little patience for this, as a reader and a writer. Literary fiction doesn’t exist to offer the reader an escape; it exists as an invitation to explore, within. When you go exploring, you’re going to find some cool shit, but it’s just as likely you’ll find a monster that threatens to devour you. If this prospect makes you recoil, you’d best avoid Kittentits.
But if you’re ready to read between the lines, to embrace disorientation, release control, and experience life through a perspective that is not your own, this is the book for you.
Did I love it? Did I hate it? Both those questions seem superfluous. This novel is a motherfucking trip. It kicks down genre categories with its steel-toed Keds and shits all over celebrity book lists with wanton abandon. Kittentits is impossible to define, and it doesn’t give a damn whether you like it or not.
In addition, it is, for me, a litmus test. How someone reacts to this book tells me everything I need to know about them.
What I loved:
- Batshit bonkers crazy coo-coo narration that feels like a fever dream.
- This book is bold, and brave, and wholly unique.
- I found the main character utterly believable, compelling, and relatable.
- death, ghosts, iron lungs, tap-dancing Anne Frank, ex-con, plastic baby arm clutching a bible, Quakers, balloon rides, and more death.
- I could never write this book.
What I found challenging:
- Batshit bonkers crazy coo-coo narration that feels like a fever dream.
- This book is bold, and brave, and wholly unique.
- I found the main character utterly believable, compelling, and relatable.
- death, ghosts, iron lungs, tap-dancing Anne Frank, ex-con, plastic baby arm clutching a bible, Quakers, balloon rides, and more death.
- I could never write this book.
The Q Review is a passion project to elevate stories written by indie authors & presses. I review indie fiction across all genres. If you’re interested in having me read and review your book, contact me here.
