Newsletters Dev

Growing up, my brother and I both experienced chronic daily headaches and migraines, a combination of genetics and traumatic brain injury (TBI). I struggled to describe my experience with symptoms like memory loss, word confusion, and constant pain to my friends and youth group leaders. Eventually, I gave up and pretended I was fine. That was easier, wasn’t it?

When I started reading Liontas’ memoir, I had to stop everything I was doing. I just sat down and listened to Liontas describe her concussions — she suffered from three in one year — and how those injuries to her brain are still with her to this day. Her descriptions of migraines, confusion, and brain fog jump off the page with their intense detail. Her prose is lush, beautifully woven together across the page. She has to get off a train while traveling to go teach. She has to flag down a law enforcement officer because she realizes too late that she can’t make the short walk to a friend’s house. She keeps calling a colleague by the wrong name on a work call.

The title stems from a beautiful essay in the book where Liontas describes how sex with her wife became impossible. Something she used to crave now caused her pain. Her brain disrupted her joy as well as her close relationship with her wife. Much of this memoir centers around Liontas’ relationship with her wife. We are invited into their world with snippets of redacted conversation transcripts, and we, as readers, wonder if their relationship will make it until the end of the memoir.

I adore this book’s structure, how Lontas tells her story in fragments, moving from moment to moment. She stops, starts, corrects herself, mimicking how many people with TBIs think. She tells her story in a way that gives readers a little glimpse into how her brain works. In this way, she doesn’t cater to neurotypical minds. Instead, Liontas embraces the way her mind works now, inviting those of us with similar conditions to do the same.

This book is told from multiple viewpoints divided by chapter. We have three main characters, all young adults: Adiah, Koffi, and Ekon. It all takes place in Lkossa, a large town on the edge of The Greater Jungle. The Greater Jungle is an utterly terrifying place, and most people, if not all people, who go into the Greater Jungle do not make it out alive. There is a demon in the jungle called the Shetani that murders anyone who enters. It’s the most feared beast ever known and yet not much is known about it because no one meets the Shetani and lives.

Adiah is a daraja, which is a person who can use magic; however, in this book, it’s not called magic; it’s called the Splendor. The Splendor is something that a daraja can pull from the world around them and allow it to move through them as they use it. It is really dangerous to keep hold of the Splendor inside them, so they just act as conduits.

Koffi and her mother are indentured servants at the Night Zoo, a place that has all kinds of wild and fantastical beasts. The owner of the Night Zoo is Baaz, and he is an incredibly awful person. Koffi and her mother have been working there for years to pay off multiple kinds of debts that her father had owed.

Finally, there’s Ekon, who was raised in the temple of Lkossa with his brother. They were orphans, and their father was killed by the Shetani. All Ekon has ever wanted was to be a warrior, and when we first meet him, he is about to do his final test to become one.

There is so much I want to say about this book, but I don’t want to give it all away. It was really fun, and some parts were creepy and definitely violent. There are a few great twists, and the viewpoints and stories are woven together. This first book definitely ends on a cliffhanger, but the second book is already out, and the third comes out tomorrow, so there’s no need to wait.