I couldn't read this as an ebook for some reason so will get it when it comes out! Sorry! (Leaving a 4 star review to be fair.)

A beautiful and beguiling book from the wonderful Yiyun Li. An unusual tale of friendship, power and exploitation that took me a while to get into but I couldn't stop reading once it hooked me in.

People have compared this to Ferante (of which I have still to read) so for me i had nothing to compare it to which I think was a good thing as I went in slightly blind and as a result enjoyed it. Yes, it's a slow burn with not much plot but something about the writing and hinged relationship between the two friends had me hooked. I loved the setting , quite vivid and atmospheric and having read it just after a trip to France made the experience even better for me . It reads a bit like a modern fairytale but it worked for me and I definitely need to pick up her other work.

This book was so strange and beautiful, I hardly know how to describe it. It's a surprising tale about girlhood and friendship. It's also a story about power and exploitation, and about resisting such forces. I deeply loved the characters Agnes and Fabienne and all the weird offshoots of them both.

I listened to an Audiobook, and many times I found myself wishing I was reading it. I both wanted to study the prose, which was beautiful, and I wanted the freedom to move backward and forward more easily in the narrative. I kept thinking that the timeline bore on my interpretation of the book's meaning. This is a clever, evocative book, so I'm going to buy a print copy and reread it!

ChatGPT
Fabienne has passed away, prompting Agnès, her childhood companion, to receive the news in America, distant from their French rural upbringing. This is the very place Fabienne helped Agnès escape from ten years ago. Now, Agnès has the freedom to recount her tale.

In a remote town during their youth, they crafted a hidden world, visible only to them. However, Fabienne devised a transformative plan, launching Agnès into a journey of fame, fortune, and profound sorrow.

This book is a gem. I adore historical fiction, particularly when it explores unfamiliar eras or circumstances, and this book fits that perfectly. Meticulously researched and compellingly narrated, it not only entertained me but also enriched my knowledge. A delightful read, ideal for historical fiction enthusiasts.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

This was my first read from author Yiyun Li, and I enjoyed my time. I was not quite expecting the book to go down the route it did, but I enjoyed a look at toxic friendships, and also the complexity of friendships as they blossom into adulthood.

I found the writing, simple, yet so easy to read and digest. I am very much looking forward to jumping into another book by Yiyun Li.

I have really loved this novel, the second I read by Yiyun Li (after Kinder Than Solitude, published in 2013). I think she has a great talent for creating characters that are interesting enough to follow and aren't quite relatable. In Kinder Than Solitude too, her characters were haunted, secretive, mysterious - they have just enough feelings to be characters you care about, but they remain 'other'.

"One half orange plus another half orange do not make a full orange again. And this is where my story begins".

The Book of Goose was compared to Elena Ferrante, which I have not read yet, but I found that the setting - mostly rural France, just after WWII - and the characters' hunger for more reminded me of Balzac. The two young girls, Agnes and Fabienne, spend their time together playing new games, devised by Fabienne, the shepherdess, telling each other stories, bored to death in their small village, living in poverty, with little prospects outside of marriage and children. When Fabienne decides their new game will be to write books, Agnes follows - follows so much that she ends up a child prodigy, published author, sent to a chic finishing school in England to perfect her education (and publish more books). It is a book about friendship, and about childhood, dreams, ambition and potential.

It reads like a modern fairy tale, and it is highly quotable - at times nearly too much, at the beginning especially there is a succession of sentences that feel nearly manufactured to be quoted in book reviews, beautiful and curated and a bit empty. The plot is not much of a plot either in the end, everything going a bit too fast and the characters... are a bit empty as well. It didn't bother me as much as it would because it was done so successfully, but I felt the craft showed a bit too much. For me this is a 3.5 stars (rounded up) because despite not feeling like there was much going on, it was written so beautifully that I felt really immersed in the fairy tale atmosphere of the "peasant girls", of the smart boarding school and the strict headmistress. It felt empty but purposefully empty.

I did enjoy this but I wouldn’t say I loved it. I found the characters hard to believe or warm to, and it felt like a lesser version of the Neapolitan Quartet (I know this comparison has been made before). The realities of post-war rural France were very interesting, especially from the perspective of a naive child.

I read this book in early January and I'm still thinking about it now. It's definitely a contender for my book of the year. It has shades of Annie Ernaux and Marguerite Duras in the absolute best way and I cannot wait to see what Li writes next. Put it on your TBR pile immediately.

Unfortunately, this book and I had to part ways at about 15%. I found I couldn't stand the narrator's voice and the story didn't grip me. Some literary novels are just too literary for me and this is one of them. Having said that, I will be recommending we purchase a copy for our library as I'm sure quite a few patrons would enjoy this book.

Pick it up if you're a fan of Elena Ferrante or enjoy complicated friendships between women.

This was a slow grower. I really wasn't sure about it for the first chapters, Fabienne and Agnes' friendship annoyed me no end. But like many good books, I slowly became to appreciate the hard edge of their friendship, never liking it but enjoying it as a device. Agnes' lack of direction or drive for anything but moving towards Fabienne was excruciating, moving from suffocating French village to suffocating English finishing school and back again, everything changed on her return.

"The secret of being Fabienne's true friend: to stay still in her shadow, to be as empty as the air around her, and to be everywhere with her."

The Book of Goose centres on the friendship between Frabienne and Agnes from the French village of Saint Remy. We already know from the beginning that Fabienne is dead and Agnes is reflecting on their early life. The girl's relationship is intense and obsessive. Fabienne tells morbid stories and Agnes writes them down with the help of M. Devaux, the recently widowed postmaster. Their book is published with Agnes' name on the cover, eventually changing their relationship and marking the beginning of the end of their friendship.

When I first starting reading this, I was excited. The prose was beautiful and absolutely captured the intensity of their relationship. It reminded me of The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir, the type of friendship that only comes in childhood. Halfway through there was a shift, a change in location seemed to change the writing style. Intentional or not, it didn't grip me like the first half had. For the beautiful first half however, I'm still glad I read it.

This highly recommended novel, lauded by the NYT and others, tells the story of two young friends from an impoverished background in post war rural France. One will escape, the other will flounder and die young. With strong resonances of Elena Ferrante’s epic Neapolitan saga, the Book of Goose shows how early female friendship is often the least celebrated but most deep rooted of relationships.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and while it doesn’t come close to Ferrante (who could), I liked the themes and characterisation and setting.

I wanted to love this so badly. And I did really like it but there was just something stopping it being a 5 star read for me and I can’t put my finger on it. I’m not sure if it was pacing or writing style… one I will revisit to make my mind up on though for sure.

Agnès and Fabienne are childhood friends in rural France. With their family either dead or indifferent to them, they rely on each other. The fairy-tale quality of the novel made me forget it was modern but was set in the 50s.

As an adult living in America, Agnès looks back on a plot the friends hatched to make Agnès a prodigy author. It’s a game that gets more complicated as they have to navigate the adult world and expectations.

Despite the constant insults, there was a touching love between the girls that they could only express through letters that they pretended were between Agnès and Fabienne’s imaginary brother. Ultimately, you understood that their motivations were to uplift and save the other.

The dynamics of the friendship between the girls reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. However, the comparisons end there for me. Unfortunately, I didn’t find this novel compelling and I didn’t understand some of the themes, such as ruining the lives of older men and oranges (anyone?). I found the characterisation a bit weak; with a drab and smart one, a beautiful and naive one and the evil headmistress but maybe I was missing something.

In truth, I had a tough time with this one. After seeing many glowing reviews, I was really excited to read Yiyun Li for the first time. I suspect this book was not the best one to start with. While well-written, the retrospective view made the story feel cold and detached, I struggled to develop a connection with the characters. The first 40% was enjoyable, but as we entered the period at the school, the narrative became increasingly tedious. This may be a case of me not getting it, but sad to say this book wasn’t for me.

Fiendishly clever and beautifully written, this is a wonderfully macabre tale that examines the intensity of childhood friendships and the slipperiness of storytelling.

This was a beautiful and immersive novel, although it’s rather difficult to categorise. We follow the friendship of two young girls, Agnes and Fabienne, who are born into impoverished circumstances sometime after the first and second world wars in France. The girls enjoy an intense yet strange friendship, Agnes happy to follow along with the more wild Fabienne, and a series of ‘games’ they invent to amuse themselves in what they describe as the boredom of their poor and small town. The game they decide to play, which features as the centrepoint of this novel, is to write a book together. This involves Fabienne coming up with the plot and Agnes as transcriber, happy to follow along until the game of being authors begins to turn Agnes’s life upside down and take her far away from the one thing that makes her happy - Fabienne. Others have compared this to My Brilliant Friend and there is definitely a strong similarity, particularly as it is Agnes narrating on her past and reflecting on her friendship with the more wilful and unschooled friend; but this is approached in a very different setting. Fabienne and Agnes are obsessed with the sinister and morbid and goad each other into behaviours that they probably wouldn’t imagine alone - an interesting book full of interesting characters. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of some elements of the friendship but I think that is part of what also made it very engaging - these characters are complex and still at an age where they don’t necessarily even understand their own motivations or desires, and not sure who they can trust. In their quest to find a place for themselves they question what is real.

My thanks to #NetGalley and 4th estate for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

i really wanted to like this as something about the premise and setting brought to mind joanne harris. but as stories of obsessive friendship go this just didn't grab me that much.

This novel is OUTRAGEOUSLY GOOD. Yiyun Li's THE BOOK OF GOOSE is a strange, spiky and beguiling novel about teenage friends, Agnés and Fabienne, living in loving in rural France in the 1950s. Bored by the adults around them and the 'virtuousness' preached at school, they devise elaborate and thrilling make-believe games. For one such 'game' they decide to write a book: Fabienne dictates macabre, disturbing stories which Agés transcribes. With the help of a recently widowed postmaster living in their village, the girls send the novel to a Parisian publisher. Fabienne is insistent that obedient Agnés poses as the book's sole author, and, as Agnés becomes a literary sensation in the vein of Francoise Sagan, their 'game' becomes increasingly complex, eventually threatening to sever their bond. There are real shades of Lila and Elena from Ferrante's Neopolitian novels here: a novel that looks at the sordid, more troubling parts of adolscent girlhood and the intensity of childhood friendship. I could not put this seductive, thrilling, subversive novel down - I LOVED it.

'The world was often inconvenient or indifferent to us, and it was our ingenuity that made what was inconvenient and indifferent interesting: the stinging nettles left bloody marks on our legs as we ran, but we pretended that those were the nail scratches of the girls greedy for our attention....We were not liars, but we made our own truths as extravagant as we needed them to be, fantastic as our moods required'.