Jay HoskingAnmeldelser

I'm giving this one a four, as the bulk of the book was really enjoyable, with a surprisingly sweet love story at its heart. The writing was, for the most part, exceptionally good (but there were a few bone-jarring sentences here and there).

I even enjoyed the 2008/2007/2006 format of the narrative quite a bit.

My problem is with the ending. And, unfortunately, it's my problem with most mind-bending story endings.

I find that an author can set up a scenario that's quite cool (I'm looking at you, Raw Shark Texts and Area X trilogy), and the suspense builds and builds until the author actually takes you to that world...and it then always seems to come down to one of two things...

1 - it's essentially just our world with some minor changes (lame), or...
2 - it's fairly different, but the author decides not to explain it, so you don't know what the fuck they're on about.

This one kind of covers both aspects, making it even more frustrating. Much of what happens is not explained at the end, and the world over there is basically our world, for the most part.

And then there's a central point that simply doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever... but it's spoiler territory, so I'll hide it behind the Spoiler Wall...

If Grace has found a way to move over to subjective time, that is, to finally be completely alone... how the fuck do both John and Grace's younger brother (the narrator) get there? And why is NO ONE ELSE there, except Officer 2510, who seems to just show up to move the plot along?

Makes no sense. Wouldn't they all ultimately end up inhabiting their own individual subjective time worlds?

Also, what the hell is with the dirt from the dead end near John's and why is it so special and how does he know this? And what did he dig up?

Far too many unanswered questions.



So, in the end, five stars for the lead up, but only three for the ending.

I really really really wanted to like this story. But I didn't. I was able to follow along for the most part but there were times when I really felt like I missed the point. This book had an interesting idea but I think it failed when it came to execution. There was really nothing I loved about this novel - other than the reference to different places in Toronto, of course. I didn't like any of the characters. They fell flat and had a one dimensional personality that was hard to love. I simply had no connection and that led me to not care about the story at all. There were times when the story was moving along but I had no clue what was going on; it made me wish the author would explain his thoughts a bit more so that I could follow along. It was slow-paced and not much really happened in the novel. Unfortunately, this story left me feeling quite disappointed. Unless you are really into space and time paradoxes, I wouldn't recommend this novel.

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After spending many years drifting between school and go-nowhere jobs, a young man is drawn back to the city where he grew up which is where his older sister, Grace, is living. Grace is a promising graduate student in psychophysics, she has a boyfriend who absolutely adores her and a small group of caring friends - friends that welcome "Little Brother" with open arms. Not long after arriving in the city it becomes clear that something is off with his sister. She flies into sudden rages, usually directed at her boyfriend who also happens to be her fellow researcher. When Grace disappears and her boyfriend shortly afterwards, the narrator makes a discovery while cleaning out their apartment - a box big enough to crawl inside, a lab rat, and a note that reads 'this is the only way back for us.' He then embarks on a quest to find out what happened to his sister, a pursuit that forces him to question both time and space.

Honestly, I'm not sure how to put in words what I felt about this book. It's complex, it's interesting and it will bend your mind into a pretzel. Not a whole lot happens in the book, but it was still a page-turner. The characters felt real. I especially loved Buddy and now want a pet rat. And I loved the setting- Toronto!

I liked the way the author constructed the the story. It kept me going til the end.

This what I call a delicious read. A Sci mystery, twists, conflicts and self-arguments. This book is full of them.
Story is about a young brother who comes back to the city after some years and start hanging out with his sister, her boyfriend and their friends. His sister goes missing one day and after a year the boyfriend goes missing too. To try to search and find these two the young brother steps in the crazy path those two already passed through.
Never in the story have learn about the young brother name despite the fact that he is the main character. He’s always called by names given to him by others Danger,Little Brother,Scruffy and it seems that actually he is being shaped by others. Always looking up to his sister he is confused when she disappears. As he proceed in solving the mystery of their research and disappearance he finds himself too.
Totally recommended if you enjoy mental games.

Three Years with the Rat by Jay Hosking is a highly recommended debut genre-bending novel about a young man looking for his sister.

The unnamed narrator in Three Years with the Rat is called by various nicknames, Grace's little brother, Scruffy by a friend, and Danger by his new Toronto girlfriend, Nicole (or Trouble.) When our narrator, an underachiever with no real life goals, moves to Toronto where Grace and John, her boyfriend, live, he meets their friends and is included in their social circle. Grace is graduate student in psychophysics. She and John are working on a project involving rats and "subjective time."

When John and Grace's landlord calls and wants him to clean out their apartment because they are gone, our narrator discovers in their apartment a handmade wooden box big enough to crawl inside and lined with mirrors, Buddy the rat, a notebook written in code, and a note that says: This is the only way back for us. Now he must unravel what they did and how to get them back. He knows that somehow Buddy can disappear and travel back and forth between wherever space the box leads to and where our narrator lives.

The narrative jumps back and forth in time over the three years in the title, 2006-2008, so readers will want to pay attention to what year they are in which is noted at the start of each chapter. That doesn't mean you will understand everything that is happening during that timeline, but eventually more and more information is revealed that will help you later. This shifting chronology makes the presentation feel fragmented, so you will have to overcome this as you are reading.

The novel itself has elements of science fiction, a mystery, suspense/horror, and magic realism. It is definitely not straight science fiction. The writing is good. Characters aren't as well developed as I prefer so I was never fully invested in what happens to them, and the dialogue is awkward. While the narrator seeks answers about where his sister and John went, he is also seeking answers about what happened with his relationship with Nicole, and he's trying to care for Buddy.

All this seems like I might rate Three Years with the Rat lower, but I was intrigued by the idea and was able to overlook some elements of the presentation to get to the end of the story. It's not fully resolved, but enough for closure. Additionally, I was eager to read what happened next and thought about Three Years with the Rat after I was finished with the novel. 3.5 rounded up.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of St. Martin's Press.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2017/01/three-years-with-rat.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1894970890

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

The promotional material for Jay Hosking's Three Years with the Rat claims that the novel is "reminiscent of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves," but as typical with this kind of stuff, that's simply a lie; in fact the one and only thing the two books have in common is that they both feature a space that's bigger on the inside than on the outside. Other than that, this book consists of not much more than a fairly pedestrian coming-of-age tale, plotted with the immaturity of a Young Adult novel and featuring dialogue that badly suffers from Joss Whedon Syndrome*, a book that hits all the notes you would expect from such a story (boy moves to Big City, boy makes new group of friends, boy gets into first serious romantic relationship, boy breaks up from first serious romantic relationship), only with a metafictional element holding the story spine together, in that it's the boy's older sister who convinces him to move there, and she and her boyfriend are both scientists who are working on some kind of shadowy project that supposedly supersedes the normal laws of space and time.

That's led St. Martin's Press to unwisely market this as a science-fiction novel, or at least a literary novel with strongly science-fictional overtones (thus the House of Leaves comparison on the dust jacket); but actual SF fans like myself will be disappointed by Three Years with the Rat, not only because the science part is dished out in such a poorly paced, haphazard way (smart readers can essentially glean everything they're trying to do in chapter 1, then the rest of the novel is a series of flashbacks where Hosking tries to slowly reveal the very information he fully showed in the first chapter), but because the eventual "science" that's revealed sounds literally like something a stoned undergraduate would come up with after a bullshit session in the dorm with their buddy**, then afterwards decide would make for a good subject off which to base an entire novel.

That's a huge problem here, because there's nothing compelling left once you discount the disappointing concept at the center of the book; and when combined with the immature writing style that's clearly being presented as something for grown-ups, that makes for a book that's hard to recommend and kind of a slog to actually read. I'm tacking on a few extra points to its score today anyway, as an acknowledgement that teens and Whedon fans will undoubtedly like this more than I did; but make no mistake, despite what St. Martin's is trying to peddle here, Primer this ain't.

Out of 10: 7.3

*Joss Whedon Syndrome: When dialogue supposedly meant for grown-ups is written in an overly twee and flippant style, which some people apparently like for some unfathomable reason, but for me is like fingernails down a chalkboard.

**"Dude, you know how, like, time seems to stand still when you're waiting in line at the grocery store? What if it actually does?" "Awww, duuuude." "And what if, like, you could control that time speed by putting six mirrors together directly across from each other in a cube, so that they're, like, all infinitely mirroring each other?" "Awww, duuuuuddde!" "And what if, like, what if you sat in the middle of that mirror cube, and like your entire past ceased to exist because of it, so then you could go back to your ex-girlfriend and undo all the dick moves that made her break up with you the first time?" "Stop, dude, stop! YOU'RE FREAKING ME OUT, DUDE!!!"