SJ Sindu

I’ve always been confused when reviewers call a book a “fever dream.” The connotations of the description are never clear to me—is it a good thing? Does it signal some postmodern breaking of semantics? Or is that a nice way to describe a book that doesn’t piece itself together? I’ve avoided the term myself, for so long, because of these confusions. But there’s no other way to describe Katie Jean Shinkle’s slim and beautiful book, Ruination. It’s a fever dream in the best sense—lilting, hallucinatory prose that undulates between the microscopic focus of a young girl’s queer crush and the […]