My Review
This book…was a series of mind games from the first chapter to the very last page.
I still don’t understand, 100%, what I read – even two weeks after I finished the book.
Was it a good read? Yes.
Was it confusing? Yes.
Did I enjoy the entire book, from beginning to end? Yes.
Did this book piss me off? Also yes.
But something about it just kept me reading, and I couldn’t put it down. I didn’t read the whole thing in one sitting, but it was pretty close – there was just something different offered here.
It handled a lot of heavy themes, mostly grief and mental illness. The way it handled grief was not only frightening and dark, but the narrator did a great job of keeping things light at times when I’m pretty sure I would have been losing it.
“When someone dies, it becomes a competition to be in charge of the history of that person. People want their memory to be the real one.”
Gabriel, our narrator, has just gotten word that he lost his father. Gabriel’s brother invites him to stay in their father’s home and begin cleaning it out, and while he has every intention of doing so, he just…doesn’t.
Things begin to happen.
First, his skin starts falling off. Then he stumbles upon his mother’s manuscript for a book she was writing. This, albeit not very odd in itself, seems to change from time to time when Gabriel reads it. Events that happen in the story are different each time he reads through it, leading to an obvious fear and confusion. When he confronts his mother, who is in a care home, about the manuscript, she is confused. Then he meets a young boy and a young girl who are stealing a car and running away – and there is something about the young boy and girl that remind him of someone, maybe even some time ago. But no one else seems to see the boy or girl or realize that they are there. Finally, Gabriel finds a video tape while going through his father’s things, and it’s odd as well – not to mention the stories his father were writing before he died. Every time he read the stories or viewed the tape, things would change – and no one else could see this.
Meanwhile, Gabriel’s skin is just falling off over and over, with new skin appearing underneath – like a snake. It is confusing and while he seeks medical attention at first, he wonders if it is indeed helping, or if it just…isn’t something that can be treated. Not to mention that the more that Gabriel’s skin peels off, the more the house itself changes…
Brat deals with grief. A lot of grief. And it deals with it in a way that might be difficult to understand, but in a way that is not entirely unfamiliar to those who have also come face-to-face with it. It’s a book that isn’t afraid to go there – to explore how grief can have an impact on mental health, and how it can often make you feel as though you are losing your grip on reality.
The characters in Brat were definitely interesting. While I liked the main character, Gabriel, I don’t feel that we had enough interaction with Gabriel’s brother to really form that much of an opinion of him. Gabriel’s brother’s wife, on the other hand, was a character that, for me, was utterly unlikable. I’m not sure what it was about her, but her overall attitude and demeanor was just something I could have gone without in the book. The character development with Gabriel was interesting to watch, although I didn’t feel there was as much of it as I had hoped there would be.
I really loved the whole book-within-a-book feeling that the short stories written by Gabriel’s father and the manuscript by his mother offered. They were definitely a nice touch to the book, especially when they kept changing each time he read them. I love reading things like that, things that feel almost haunted on their own.
Brat is the kind of book that stays with you even after you’ve finished reading, because there’s so much that you try to keep reading into and understand that you have to process it. It’s a good book, and it definitely has its highs and lows, but overall, I would definitely enjoy reading through this one again.
