HollowayReview posted September 24, 2026.
Clarion Books, 2026. 330 pages.
Review written September 11, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review
After I heard Elana Arnold speak about this book at the National Book Festival, I put it on the top of my TBR pile. I'm going to call it Historical fiction, but it could also be called Paranormal or Science Fiction.
Our protagonist is Nora, an autistic teen whose senior year happened during the pandemic. Now she's backpacking in France on her own in 2021, looking for a place to scatter her anti-vax mother's ashes.
After a stranger disrupts her campsite, Nora wanders into a Holloway without her phone or her gear. When she meets a nice young man with a dog the next day, he agrees to take her to the village. There are some odd things along their journey. When Nora gets to the village and realizes that it's 1946, she doesn't respond calmly.
Nora gets taken to an asylum. As a reader, I thought that was a disaster and the book would be about escaping. I'd heard in the National Book Festival talk that the asylum was a real place, and the characters Nora meets were real people - patients and staff - who lived there.
There are no locks on the doors of the asylum, and it turns out to be a place of refuge, as something called "asylum" should be. Nora meets people who are also dealing with losses and horrors from the past year. She realizes that her mother had long been trying to make Nora act like everyone else, and Nora's learning what it means to be herself. The result is immersive, thoughtful, and beautiful.
Maybe time, like love, isn't a straight line. Maybe it's a curve and an arc and a spiral, too. Maybe it's a cord wrapped around the neck of a half-birthed child. Maybe time is a cave, so deep there seems no end. Maybe it's a constellation, each moment a sharp bright point, revealing its meaning only if one can step back, back, back again - or in, closer and closer, and closer, still. Maybe time is a breath, held and released.