Vern, a 15 year old black albino girl, is on the run. She's trying to escape her abusive husband, leader of the Cainland cult. After she gives birth to twins, alone in the woods, her job is to protect them from the dangers surrounding them.
Gripping read, combining reality with hauntings, supernatural and sci-fi.

Sorrowland is the story of Vern, her escape from a commune-turned-cult, her motherhood, her restless, righteous hunt for survival, for safety and for answers. It's also the story of state atrocities, overt & covert, of medical experimentation, of the body-horror and body-euphoria of transformation, of identity & feeling & being beyond the limits of language, of trauma and fury and also, insistently, tenderness.

On a conceptual level, it's brilliant and sharp-edged and startling and exhilarating; on a prose level, it's both transparent and beautiful, lush, earthy, vivid in details but always clear and always moving. Just really, really, exquisitely good!

I love the writing and voice, the beautiful imagery and the lush, strange, alternate-world setting.

Some parts of the worldbuilding I struggled with (for example, I wasn't sure how usual or unusual it was for Vern to leave her babies for hours at a time in the woods--are kids unusually tough? Mine would have been dead most likely!) and it took me a long time to grasp what was going on in her settlement (no spoilers).

It's definitely a book where you need to sit back, and let it tell its story in its own time, because it defies conventional structure and needs space to slowly make its point. If you're looking for a traditionally-structured narrative or a fast paced story then this may not be for you, but if you're happy to try a winding, intricate narrative with a surrealist bent, then there is a lot to enjoy and admire.