![]() As the truth about Marcus' identity becomes clearer, the haze that surrounds Sarah-a reimagining of Jocasta-deepens. The book is structured in interwoven sections which alternate among Gretel's first-person perspective and the close-third-person narration of Sarah and Marcus, whose timelines take place in the past. ![]() Sarah's phone call making contact sends Gretel on a quest into her own past: First to find Sarah, then to find Marcus, and finally to confront the Bonak, a creature made flesh by her and her mother's own fears. Now Gretel is an adult working as a lexicographer, and Sarah-who abandoned her into foster care 16 years earlier-has come back into her life in an even wilder and more unpredictable form. Sarah and 13-year-old Gretel believe it is the work of an uncanny creature they call the Bonak, and, with the help of a wandering boy named Marcus, they determine to trap and kill it. One winter, dogs, cats, and even children begin to go missing from the communities that live on the river. ![]() Their relationship is intensely iconoclastic and isolated: They haul their own water, fish for much of their food, speak a language peppered with made-up words, school each other with entries from Sarah's encyclopedia. Gretel was raised in the sole company of her mother, Sarah, on an engineless houseboat moored in a quiet part of the River Thames. A retelling of Oedipus Rex set in the insular community of the boat people who live along the canals of Oxford. ![]()
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