TL;DR: Aquarium is an enigmatic coming-of-age story written in poetic prose and full of confusing, surprising, and unsettling relationships. My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to love Aquarium. For one, it’s about sisters, and I LOVE a sister story. Two, I read very little literature featuring characters with disabilities, and despite the fact that the author herself is hearing, she appears to have done thorough research in deaf communities. Three, I’m striving to read more literature in translation (this story was originally written in Hebrew). 

All in all, I think Aquarium’s plot and narration were too enigmatic and its prose too poetic for my personal tastes. The sisters--Lili and Dori--were not reliable narrators, which becomes especially clear by the end of the book when secondary characters are introduced as chapter narrators (after the majority of the book is limited to Lili and Dori’s perspectives). Early on, their unreliability was because they were young children. Dori was understandably confused when she (alone, without her sister) was removed from her childhood home, placed in a state institution, and fretted over by researchers, psychologists, and social workers. Later on in the book, their unreliability stems from the fact that as adults both women seem pretty stunted in their ability to relate interpersonally to others. This is perhaps unsurprising since they were raised in a maybe-cult (never outright confirmed). Their parents moved them as young girls onto a remote rural compound where their intense authoritative father amassed a following of apostles to his dogmatic creed that the hearing world was bad and to be rejected in all forms, including using assistive technology such as hearing aids and cochlear implants. 

On top of the narration, the prose is very poetic, which was beautiful, but also frustrating for a reader like myself who’s partial to more direct writing.

I also had some feelings about the supporting male characters in the lives of Lili and Dori. In particular, Dori’s young adult romantic-ish partner, Anton, gave me some weird vibes. He listens with rapt, almost fetishistic, attention to Dori’s stories about her confusing and traumatic childhood, which she seems to dole out in snippets to prolong his romantic interest in her. When Dori leaves the custody of the state, she takes up panhandling in coffee shops, seemingly as a coping mechanism for reconciling her childhood with her identity as a hearing person. Anton is fascinated by this habit and gets voyeuristic enjoyment from accompanying her to watch. When Dori shows him letters she’s received from Lili, many unopened, he reads them and develops a somewhat obsessive parasocial relationship with her, the sister he’s never met. This book is full of relationships and characters that are interesting because they are confusing, or surprising, or unsettling. 

I did really, really enjoy the descriptions of sign language and the characters’ code switching between their language and lip-reading and speaking.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for giving me advance access to this book in exchange for an honest review.