Name: Pew
ISBN: 9781783785179

CATHERINE. LACEY

Clara Gauthier

Sometimes I think I might be writing a letter to sleep, that I might be asking him if he remembers me, if he ever plans on coming back. 

I was buried by night. The body is already dead, I thought. I was still smiling. The body is your tomb. 

When the outside is far enough from you, that is when a person can sleep.

Sometimes I think I might be writing a letter to sleep, that I might be asking him if he remembers me, if he ever plans on coming back. I’ve received no word from death’s brother.

Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained?

I felt I wasn’t the only one, that there must have been others, that I was part of a “we,” only I didn’t know where they were.

...lost in the idea of a disembodied world, one where ideas could hold other ideas, where thoughts could see other thoughts and death couldn't end thoughts, where one remained alive by thinking and was not alive if not thinking.

Did everyone feel this vacillating, animal loneliness after removing clothes? How could I still be in this thing, answering to its endless needs and betrayals?

How lucky we are to have the moon. It seemed that hardly anyone ever saw the sky anymore. Had we all forgotten it was there? All this time below it, we forget. Maybe the sky will leave us someday, then we will be able to realise what it was.

Resting on that table, not getting undressed, not putting on the paper gown, I feared I'd become something sacrificial, but I would not lay myself on this altar. Whatever else I may have been, I was, I knew, not theirs.

Catherine Lacey

One of Vogue's Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2020, one of BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated Books of 2020, one of Vulture's Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2020, and one of The Millions Most Anticipated Books of the First Half of 2020 A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy In a small unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives to a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless, racially ambiguous, and refuses to speak. One family takes the strange visitor in and nicknames them Pew. As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origins. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of their true nature—as a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths. Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.

A Novel

The weird, unsettling, small town setting of Pew was so easy to visualise. The town gossip, how everyone pushed their problems onto the first person who couldn't, or I should say, wouldn't say anything back, made it easy to really delve into the drama of this small town. I'm learning that similarly to how I love being nosy in real life, I love being nosy in fiction and knowing all the hot goss. I did think, and hope, this book was going in a weirder direction. It felt like it was building and building, but we didn't quite get there. I didn't mind the open ending, I liked it actually, but I do wish this.. unspoken and taboo ritual was freakier than just the whole town dressing in white and confessing whilst blindfolded. It did mention literal sacrifices and I wished it showed more of that darker history of the town. The prose was beautiful and I'm so glad Pew remained gender neutral to the reader and the town because so much of the ambiguity and non-conformance would have been lost otherwise.

3.75

The weird, unsettling, small town setting of Pew was so easy to visualise. The town gossip, how everyone pushed their problems onto the first person who couldn't, or I should say, wouldn't say anything back, made it easy to really delve into the drama of this small town. I'm learning that similarly to how I love being nosy in real life, I love being nosy in fiction and knowing all the hot goss. I did think, and hope, this book was going in a weirder direction. It felt like it was building and building, but we didn't quite get there. I didn't mind the open ending, I liked it actually, but I do wish this.. unspoken and taboo ritual was freakier than just the whole town dressing in white and confessing whilst blindfolded. It did mention literal sacrifices and I wished it showed more of that darker history of the town. The prose was beautiful and I'm so glad Pew remained gender neutral to the reader and the town because so much of the ambiguity and non-conformance would have been lost otherwise.

i loved this book! highly recommend if you are looking for a literary exploration of class, race, and conservatism in the south - can’t wait to read more of lacey’s work!

Woo! Wild ride! For people okay with open interpretations and ambiguity (me). Love nothing more than a massive Le Guin reference. Time to read all of Lacey’s other books!

taylor miles hopkins

armoni mayes

like 2.5 stars because i finished it but honestly didn’t enjoy it very much

zatul 

her writing reminds me of ursula k le guin

Isabella 

what an odd book (in a good way). only kind of understood it because i have read the ones who walk away from omelas. the themes were great, and this book was really interesting. it just wasnt an enjoyable read for me hence the rating.

Lisa-Maria Hofmann

The kind of story that is just effective in written form. Loved the flow, the discomfort and the slow burn. Somewhat anticlimactic though. Definitely haunted me for a while after finishing it. 

I read in another review that it is worth reading the Ursula Le Guin short story that is quoted in the beginning of Pew. Highly recommend doing so. It added some more hints for further interpretation of the story and made it even more enjoyable for me.

Ethan Hill

Julija M

Thank you Netgalley and Granta Publications for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Pew is an interesting story about Pew who got their name after a church pew they were found sleeping on.They were woken in the middle of Mass by a local family who later decided to help Pew and offered them a place in their home.
Pew is unusual because no one knows Pew's gender,race,real name-nothing.And Pew aren't keen on telling that to anyone-they rarely talk and don't actually know their name,gender or race themselves.
The local community wants to help Pew but when they don't cooperate the community decides to take it upon themselves to decide what to do with Pew without asking them anything which is what angered me most throughout the book.Pew was never asked whether they wanted help,whether they actually wanted to stay in strangers' homes and hang out with people they don't like.They were just taken from one place to another and expected to stay there and behave accordingly.
The community was accustomed to everyone who lived in town and didn't get new visitors or tourists often and really,when Pew appeared,they just wanted to keep them under control and control what they were doing in town while making it seem like kind help. If they were kind,they would've treated Pew nicer and would've cared more about them and their feelings. Instead,no one offered to have a nice conversation with them and Hilda even locked them in the attic so they wouldn't come down when it wasn't appropriate to everyone else.
The whole book was leading up to the Forgiveness Festival-a local ceremony for forgiveness of one's sins,no matter what they were. When the Festival came,and along with it the end of the book, I felt slightly disappointed. Maybe I didn't understand it the way it was intended but I feel like the ending wasn't enough.I would've liked to know what happened to Pew after the ceremony and sadly,I didn't get that closure.

Imane

i didn't know what to expect but it still somehow managed to subvert my expectations. so much packed in such a short uncanny book. i'm left pondering about a lot of things but feel no desire to list any of them as i believe that discovering the dark underbelly of the town pew stumbles upon as the week progresses in the story one of the major draw of this book. i highly recommend it but i'd also recommend to understand that this book will take you to strange, sometimes violent, sometimes moving, places, and pew will never let you know more than anyone around them knows, or that perhaps even them know at all. but i'd recommend it to people who loved piranesi by susanna clarke and lanny by max porter!

tw: antiblackness (hate crime confession), implied sexual assault

Lulu Bonning

Rich and foreboding characters, very eery and atmospheric. Enjoyment was probably more than 3 stars, but I found my mind drifting occasionally and already the bones of Pew are getting hazy in my mind.

Vida Koster

This book is perfect book report material. It is about humanity, kindness in the face of difference, race, identity, religion, tradition, the stories we tell about ourselves and others. I can see myself rereading it.

I feel someone more clever than me could peel back the layers of the story and explain it better but all I can say is I enjoyed it and recommend it.

Katie elliott

Grace M

Katie Berges 

Kwan Ann Tan

PEW.

tori

Maisie MacDonald

Fleeing a past they can no longer remember, Pew wakes on a church bench, surrounded by curious strangers. Pew doesn't have a name, they've forgotten it. Pew doesn't know if they're a girl or a boy, a child or an almost-adult. Is Pew an orphan, or something worse? And what terrible trouble are they running from? Pew won't speak, but the men and women of this small, god-fearing town are full of questions. As the days pass, their insistent clamour will build from a murmur to a roar, as both the innocent and the guilty come undone in the face of Pew's silence.

Pew

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