This was a reread, but it had been several years since I first read J, so that I had largely forgotten the plot and definitely forgotten the ending. As a fan of dystopian fiction, I really enjoyed this book. But the story is melancholy and perplexing.
You have to be willing, as a reader, to accept that you don’t really know what is going on in the broader world of the book. The plot is built around a mysterious past event that shaped the (unnamed) nation, and that seems like it was probably a genocide or at least a mass violence event against a minority population. But the point of the story is that no one knows the details of the past, because the society decided it was better to forget and eliminate records or shared knowledge of its history.
So, you are left with closely following the day-to-day lives of Kevern and Ailinn, the two main characters who come together under unexpected circumstances. I found it interesting and thought-provoking that the book spends a lot of time on mundane details of their daily lives, as a vehicle for examining bigger philosophical and moral questions of “otherness”. There is also a lot of inspection of the internal thoughts of different characters. This was necessary because, it seemed to me, most people in the book wouldn’t have direct, honest conversations with each other, out of fear that they would say something impermissible. That was an interesting dynamic – many characters could only be in true, honest conversation with themselves, because they couldn’t be open with anyone else.
J is an introspective, sad, good book.
