incredibly rich from a literary perspective, a book primarily centric around identity, all this presented through a Canterbury Tales or Generation X-ian series of stories held together by a framing device. Where the brilliance kicks in though is how despite this all the "short stories" are all still deeply interconnected and most build off of previously gathered information as shown in the story, even the most minute detail remaining very consistent. A book where, yes, technically, in the end, nothing really happens well except in the last chapter lol, but that's, I think, part of why it works: it's a still photo of a couple of families. Sure, the photo itself does stay the same, but after someone explains to you the histories of the people pictured, everything changes.
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