Negative Space

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God the scenes with Jill and her family and its breaking apart are damn hard to read. The awkward tension, the fissure between her and her father (who clearly cares for his daughter but also clearly does not see her as a whole person and using this as a means for control, whether consciously or not), the emotional numbness and downward spiral of Jill’s mom after his death and the way Jill cruelly comes to realize that even something as supposedly steadfast and unbreakable as “family” can wisp away and fall into entropy, it all just hits way close to the bone It’s an established and sometimes awkward genre, the memoir or personal essay with forays into describing or analysing beloved artworks. But here it feels immediate and wholly convincing. A sculpture by Dorothy Cross based on the negative space inside a kiss, the “accusatory stare” of Saoirse Wall in a video self-portrait, the voice and presence of Doireann Ní Ghríofa as she reads her poetry aloud – all of this serves not as aesthetic or intellectual displacement of pain, but to ratify and enrich Leach’s understanding of it. It will claw its gravitational grasp, pull you into a dark fever dream, and it won't let go. It will crawl into your thoughts and wrap them in bleeding hallucinations. It's been over a week since I finished reading this book, and I can still hear it whispering like a night wind that blows free through my skull. And I loooooved the LGBT representation. LGBT characters exist, and aren't defined by their queerness. It's not even brought up. They're just allowed to exist, and it's wonderful. Prokhorov, Nikita (15 March 2013). Alain Nicolas in Ambigrams revealed. New Riders. ISBN 978-0-13-308646-1 . Retrieved 2021-08-07.

Someday I'll wake up and it'll be like my life's already over, because it'll be dozens of years from now already and I'm still the same. Sets of mirrors facing each other, expanding space and me and every moment I've been here. Nobody knows me, because I haven't left anything for them, and I can't stand to look half of them in the eye."

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It’s a hard book to read – due to the subject matter and the stylistic and structural choices, it’s hard to understand and often even harder to sympathize with the actions of some characters. Yet you don’t want the novel to end, like a fever dream that feels more Real than real.

Negative space is used with figure-ground ambigrams and tessellations to display words or pictures in different directions after rotation (one way or other depending on the symmetry of the image). [9] [10] See also [ edit ] Although it’s not practical to give a design education in a blog post, if you know something about negative space I bet you’ll look at books and the way they are designed very differently. And these are all lessons you can use if you decide to design your own book. So here goes: 5 Ways Negative Space Affects Book Design Overall I think this is just downright the most effective “kids on bikes” small town atmosphere I’ve ever encountered in a horror novel, ESPECIALLY because nothing is sugar coated and as I said in my original review that this dying do-nothing town and all the freaks, stoners, eccentrics and junkies that inhabit it are so tangentially familiar to me. Near the end Jill muses about how state lines are arbitrary, that it’s all really the same thing copy and pasted forever, and jfc if that doesn’t speak volumes about capitalism itself and the cycle the youth of today grow up within, the one where we are all aware of as the abyss of the future awaits us like a void in space and can do nothing but fight against this entropy through some kind of broad radical action, whether personal, empathetic and based on identity (Lu) or self-centered, desiring to escape that entropy all together through trying to achieve some spiritual apotheosis (Tyler), etc. I’ll reiterate that I still think this is probably the best fictional portrayal of misspent alienated youth I have ever seen, which is impressive especially considering how this was written in 2020 and those tropes have long been utilized throughout the decades, centuries; Yeager’s just feels so distinctly generational and urgent in a way I’ve never seen it done before Considering and improving the balance between negative space and positive space in a composition is considered by many to enhance the design. This basic, but often overlooked, principle of design gives the eye a "place to rest," increasing the appeal of a composition through subtle means. I see this book mentioned often on this sub and there’s a lot of praise for it so I put it on my reading list because people often cited it as being a mashup of junji Ito and Lovecraft. After reading it all I could feel was... nothing?

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The characters are all the same and all super annoying. There was no point to the multiple POVs because they weren't differentiated at all. No character development or growth. Tyler is literally the worst throughout the whole book and never gets better. I didn't feel bad for any of them. In recent years there has been a flourishing of Irish women who have written very different testimonies to the experience of womanhood in Ireland. This forms an elegant counterpart.’ Wish I could give this one more than 5 stars. Not just my favorite thing I've read this year, but probably one of my favorite things I've read ever? As soon as I finished it I wanted to reset my progress and start all over?? I never feel that way. Yet what makes Negative Space truly unique is Yeager’s unsentimental and refreshingly modern treatment of queerness and gender identity, which is seamlessly folded into the narrative without devolving into patronising tokenism. Yeager’s depiction of Lu, an alienated trans-woman living under the conservative rule of her parents, attests to this, in that she never outwardly declares or dramatically explains her gender identity to the reader. Rather, her identity is inferred only through the dissonances between the three separate narrators. Ahmir, as well as other peripheral characters, call her ‘Lou’ and refer to her in masculine pronouns; while Lu calls herself ‘Lu’ and uses feminine pronouns, which Jill also employs. Indeed, this device is utilised so subtly that it wasn’t until I was mid-way through the book that I made the connection, which surprised me without obstructing the narrative flow or feeling like a blatantly artificial construction. Lu’s queerness, in other words, feels both natural and unforced within the confines of the story, which is a testament to Yeager’s skill as a writer.