I’ve had Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead (can I call it DYPOTBOTD because that is a loooong title) on my TBR list for a while because it seemed to be fairly divisive. I’m pretty sure that I’ve heard both really good and bad things about this book and it made me kind of curious as to whether I like it. Spoiler alert: I found it interesting.

DYPOTBOTD is weird. You may think it’s a murder mystery since people die and there’s a killer to be found, but if you read it as a mystery, you’re going to be really disappointed. It just doesn’t hit the tropes because the main character, a middle-aged woman named Janina, isn’t actually interested in investigating. What she is interested in would be calculating horoscopes, going on long tangents, and protecting animals.

In a way, even though this isn’t really a murder mystery, the book reminded me of The Thursday Murder Club. Mostly because both books feature narrators who tend to wander off while telling the story. But to its credit, DYPOTBOTD (You know what? I’m going to call it “Drive your plow” because the acronym is too long) has an ending that is much easier to understand. And because I’m already used to mystery books with confusing narratives (see: Thursday Murder Club) and mysteries that aren’t really mysteries (see: Disappearing Earth), I was fine with this book. I knew it was weird before I started reading it and it was weird.

As a character, Janina was surprisingly endearing. She definitely comes off as an eccentric lady, but she’s aware of it and her embrace of who she is was something that I liked. I can see why the students she taught English to liked her.

Overall, Drive Your Plow was an interesting book. I can’t say that it makes me want to read the author’s other works, but I found it enjoyable and relatively easy to read, which is always a worry when I tackle something more literary/experimental.

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