The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

With her most recent novel, The Book of Goose (2022), author Yiyun Li gives us a coming of age story that explores the fraught friendship of two girls growing up in an impoverished village in rural France during the aftermath of World War II.

Agnes and Fabienne suffer neglect and hardship, yet find release and meaning in their imaginative outpourings. The power dynamics in their relationship complicate their creative process, but when their stories are discovered and published, adults they encounter in the larger world intensify their conflict by exploiting their success.

Given this subject matter and the retrospective point of view—as an adult, Agnes shares her version of the past upon learning of Fabienne’s death—The Book of Goose has been compared to My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. In terms of prose style, I personally find Yiyun Li’s writing more accessible and incisive than Ferrante’s, and the plot of The Book of Goose more traditional with its twists and turns, while at the same time being no less nuanced, unsettling, and compelling than Ferrante's work.

The Book of Goose often reads like a grim Grimm fairy tale. (Think Mother Goose with the presence of a beneficent maternal figure.) It hooked me and held my attention from beginning to end.