Menstruation
This is a novel narrated in a stream-of-consciousness style. The effect is one akin to being inside a person's head as topics randomly enter and exit. On the topic of menstruation, for instance, she declares. "It was like having a sheep between your legs, everyone said. Only abnormal girls who had no friends in the first place and nothing to do besides didn’t mind going around with a big smelly sheep wedged between their thighs all day long." The sheep simile is in reference to sanitary pads. The rest of this somewhat lengthy digression how she slowly changed her mind and became a woman who preferred the sheep to the tampon.
Humanity
On the subject of humanity, the narrator is a little less specific. "We are made up of layers, cells, constellations." This metaphorical imagery sums up a passage on the nature of non-linear maturation. The suggestion is only the daily aging of the flesh is chronological. Everything else that serves to create identity is as complex as creation at a cellular level or galactic level.
Reading is Life
The consciousness streaming directly from the narrator's thoughts to the page considers books and the act of reading to exist on the highest plane of experience. Reading and living are intertwined to the point of becoming inseparable. This concept is exemplified early on: "When we turn the page we are born again." This statement is both literal as it applies to the physical act of reading a book, but it is equally intended as a metaphor. The narrator asserts that one should turn the page to face each experience with the excited anticipation of never knowing what happens next.
Victorian Murder Mysteries
At times, the narrator demands of the reader a suspension of disbelief that her thoughts are really streaming straight from the subconscious. Juxtaposed against the predominance of short sentences marked with extreme repetition of conversational language are consciously constructed metaphor-rich descriptions. "Sitting in proximity of those slashed and mangled corpses rendered in delicate monochrome made my heart thump its way into my throat like a maimed troll heaving its smeared bulk up a wishless well by the mulish efforts of its one remaining weevil-ravaged fist." The multiple examples of metaphorical language in this sentence are all put to describe the effect of the impact of reading selections from her grandmother's vast collection of Victorian mystery novels.
The Ouroboros
During one particularly intense scene that is written with equal intensity, the narrator engages imagery in a simile that will pop up more than once. "I looked into one and saw there around the iris something more unsettling than hatred even, something like an ouroboros covered in a glittering chain of small obsidian mirrors." An ouroboros is an obscure name for that familiar image of a serpent eating its own tail. Except this is a simile and what the narrator sees in the rival's eyes is not actually eating itself. In fact, even more grotesquely, the narrator's own eyelid is able to trap the tail. The metaphor of the ouroboros becomes a recurring commentary on the cyclical nature of creation.
