Jessie Tu

She's controlling.

And July is the sort of weaker, less dominating, more accommodating little sister.

We see that she's willing to do anything.

In the course of the book, at one stage, she forces her little sister, July, to eat a whole jar of mayonnaise.

And she plays this sort of

It seems innocuous and harmless, but this game that she creates called September Says, where she basically is bullying July into doing things that are very psychologically abusive.

And we see the damage and the slow erosion of July's own sense of self and agency.

Absolutely.

Because there were a couple of moments, like you said, around the two-thirds area of the book where Johnson does something with the language, a couple of lines where you start to think maybe September is made up.

And it's that haunting kind of ghost-like element that I was speaking about before that makes you doubt everything that you had read up until that point.

And it's so captivating and arresting in a way that makes you want to channel through to the rest of the novel to the very end.

But it's very, very clever and so innovative in the way that Johnson does that.

It's very, like she structures it very well as well.

The timing is so perfect at that point in the story where we think that when we start to doubt whether our narrator is reliable.

And she does it so beautifully.

I know that I've listened to some of Daisy Johnson's interviews and she talks about how she's really interested in retelling myths and sort of taking something ancient and destroying it and rebuilding it.

And I'm so curious and interested in the ways in which she kind of deconstructs this idea of the traditional notions of the female body within the house.

And I think perhaps what she's trying to do is really

twist the narrative of the sort of domesticity and the historically traditional trajectories of a woman's life in the house.

And I think that's what makes this story and how she really involves the house and humanizes it so compellingly.