Sandwich Joe

Such an interesting concept, but the novel became stale in the second half. I did enjoy Hutson’s prose and her varied depictions of grief and anxiety. Also, the audiobook, narrated by Rachel Jacobs, was well done.

Penpal is genuinely, persistently creepy. Dathan Auerbach taps into something true about memory: we don’t experience our own pasts as continuous narrative — we experience them as fragments, and the spaces between are where this book lives.

The writing style is definitely a strange choice. There’s a formal quality to the prose that initially feels like a mismatch for the material. But it ends up serving the horror in an unexpected way, that the emotional distance reads less like a stylistic miscalculation and more like a man narrating events he still can’t fully metabolize. Whether that’s intentional or a happy accident, it works.

The ending, however, doesn’t quite stick the landing. Maybe it’s because it’s a bit rushed or maybe it just resolves too much. But for a debut novel that started as a series of Reddit posts, it has no business being this good.

Repetition is a novel that trusts its reader completely, and that trust is the whole mechanism. Hjorth’s prose is cool, controlled, and almost affectless… and yet the emotional weight is immense, because she has engineered it to live nowhere except in you. The reader supplies it. The reader completes the text. By the end, you realize you’ve been doing the same interpretive work as the narrator herself, assembling meaning from fragments and silences, never quite arriving at the thing itself.

The dual temporality (a woman in her sixties reconstructing her sixteenth year) gives you two unreliable narrators stacked on top of each other. The girl who couldn’t see what was happening. The woman who may not want to. Hjorth never resolves the distance between them, and that irresolution is precisely the point.