This book is the perfect mix between Mieko Kawakami's Heaven, Donna Tartt's The Secret History (ish) and Ramson Riggs' Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. This is not your regular read, and because we're talking about a Christelle Dabos book, you know that the writing itself is quirky and peculiar. One of the things I loved the most about The Mirror Visitor Quartet is how illogical the world — and the characters themselves— are. Christelle Dabos writes stories on the verge of the absurd in order to expose the workings of our world and the society we inhabit, and Here and Only Here is no different.

The Facts

• Published: 2024
• Original language: French‍
• Genre: Dark fantasy, coming-of-age
• Number of pages: 209

The Gist

*spoiler alert*

The very consistency of time is different Here. Recess are eternities. It’s not that they’re boring, oh no, boredom at least has something mellow, almost comfortable about it. No, we spend every second of every minute fighting the fear of putting a foot wrong, while pretending to have fun.

The book follows four narrators who attend a French school called Here, where things work a little differently: there's a student who walks upside down and on the ceiling, but no one has ever actually seen more than the marks of his footsteps; a Top-Secret Club works to prevent the end of the world which is supposed to happen on a Thursday at 2:28 pm; a classroom is socially divided in Tops and Bottoms, where the Bottoms must pay their weekly dues if they want to avoid bullying; and everyone, regardless of their social standing, is ruled by a god-like student deemed The Prince. The story is told in four separate perspectives, and each of one follows a different path that ultimately merge and lead to the unveiling of the mystery of what happens Here.

• Iris: a first-year who attempts to follow the "unspoken rules" and fit into the mold of society, only to later discover she's become invisible
• Pierre: a self-deprecating second-year who finds comfort in identifying himself as "the Odd one" and thus alienating himself from his class‍
• Madeleine: a third-year girl who develops mystical, all-powerful abilities after beating herself with comparisons against her talented friend.
• Guy: a fourth-year Top who starts breaking the social structures when he gets paired with a new, foreign student called Sofie

While these four stories develop independently, the Top-Secret Club tries to figure out where the school's pecularties come from, and while Dabos bends our brains in odd angles, various metaphors expose "the isolating perils of existing as an adolescent within the social trappings of schools that so often operate according to elaborate, cliquish, and downright indecipherable social conventions."

I feel all-powerful. My turn for paradise! I shove a whole handful of Ben’s candies into my mouth. I stop myself from spitting them back out. I crunch, but don’t understand. Paradise tastes of nothing.

What I'm loving the most about this book is that while reading it, I was reminded of what it feels like to be in that odd age where you're transitioning from middle school to high school. Life's hard and awkward and you get bullied by people for no apparent reason, adults rarely have anything helpful to say, and there are unspoken rules wherever you go. But despite being a book about middle/high school, I'd say this is definitely for the young adult audience due to the heavy subjects Dabos touches upon.

Nothing. No one clocks me. My desk doesn’t move. In the cafeteria, same thing, I pass unnoticed between the egg mayo and expired yogurt. All around me, mayhem and menace, hollering and hugging. They’re the sea, I’m the reef.

‍The Themes

• Identity, stereotypes
• Peer pressure, the price of fitting in
• Social hierarchy, fititng into the mold
• Power dynamics
• Solitude, independence
• Transitions
• Acceptance
• Failure
• Insecurities
• Sexual awakening

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The Author

Christelle Dabos is a fantasy author born in 1980 in Côte d’Azur, France. Her best-known work is The Mirror Visitor Quartet, a saga of four books first published in 2013, where the first two books of the quartet won several literary awards. She initially worked as a librarian before becoming a published author, and currently lives in Belgium. A Winter's Promise was her debut novel.

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Why you should read it:

Simple: while The Mirror Visitor Quartet had lots of plot twists, court complexities, God-like janitors and dopplegangers, Here and Only Here seems to be like a celebration of words and sentences. She plays around with meaning, sound, representation, which is extremely characteristic of her. Even if you didn't know she was the author of this book, you'd recognize Dabos' voice as soon as you open it. Moreover, her quirky/peculiar writing style goes extremely well with the way developing teenagers think/feel/act: very few things make sense when you're 13-14 years old, and while the world used to be simple it slowly gains shades of complexity, and her writing style perfectly encapsulates this dual notion of simple/complex.

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If you like this, read this:

• The Mirror Visitor Quartet by Christelle Dabos
• A Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura
• A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snickett
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ramson Riggs
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• Heaven by Mieko Kawakami
• The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Coraline by Neil Gaiman
• How Do You Live by Genzaburo Yoshino

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*This book was gifted by Europa Editions