In an attempt to prevent future war, the New Society prohibits communal and family bonds. Children are taken away from their biological families at age 10, have their memories altered, and are deprived of all forms of paternal touch such as hugs.

Dr. Miriam Gregory is one of the masterminds behind this program, and as readers find out, she may have regrets about her involvement.

You Feel It Just Below the Ribs by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson presents a fictional autobiography set in a dystopian world through the perspective of an unreliable narrator.

However, I found aspects of Dr. Gregory’s account implausible not because of the fictional publisher’s contradictory footnotes, but because they ignore basic established psychology. For instance, according to Harlow’s unethical maternal deprivation experiments and Bowlby's Evolutionary Theory of Attachment, the children Dr. Gregory worked with should have realistically presented far more behavior issues and psychological damage.

Overall, this story plays with some poignant and interesting core ideas (i.e. the examination of isolation and loneliness), but its execution ultimately falls flat.

This is an odd book to try to review. On the one hand I really enjoyed the “autobiographical“ way it was told. It really almost seemed like Miriam was talking to us, so that was very approachable. But Miriam‘s clear disassociation from other people makes her read almost like a sociopath. Don’t get me wrong, based on her tragic early life I understand why she acted that way, but it makes her ability to conduct experiments on other people’s thoughts a bit less believable. I did really enjoying the last third of the book or so when Rosemary comes back into the picture, but then it left more questions than answers. Trying to avoid spoilers, the incident that explains the title of the book, what was the point of that? It was funded with a lot of money by a lot of different entities. For what purpose??
This isn’t a bad book, but it left me with too many questions.

Thank you to NetGalley & Harper Perennial for this advanced reader copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

This book is mesmerizing. The writing is really just ::chef’s kiss::, I fell in love with the prose. That being said, I really would have enjoyed it more if I could have gotten into the world of this book just a little more. This one is a dystopian fiction disguised as a nonfictional manuscript with footnotes and interludes and all. I don’t think it’s a slam dunk. It felt very clunky to me, despite the beautiful prose. There’s a podcast called Within the Wires which takes place in this same universe. I have never listened to this podcast before but I do think that if you have listened and love the world inside it, then this book is for you. I felt like I was missing something the whole time and I went back and saw review of people saying you don’t need to know the podcast first but I disagree. For me, I felt lost and confused and honestly not invested enough to figure it all out. There are a lot of really deep meanings stuck in this book and I think it’s a great one to discuss with people who have already read it. These things kind of bothered me and I would love the chance to talk about this one. I think had this book come out before 2020, it might have been easier to jump into this completely, but some things made me feel like these writer’s just didn’t read the room.

Born at the end of the old world, Miriam grows up during The Great Reckoning, a sprawling, decades-long war that nearly decimates humanity and strips her of friends and family. Devastated by grief and loneliness, she emotionally exiles herself, avoiding relationships or allegiances, and throws herself into her work—disengagement that serves her when the war finally ends, and The New Society arises. To ensure a lasting peace, The New Society forbids anything that may cause tribal loyalties, including traditional families. Suddenly, everyone must live as Miriam has chosen to—disconnected and unattached. A researcher at heart, Miriam becomes involved in implementing this detachment process. She does not know it is the beginning of a darkly sinister program that will transform this new world and the lives of everyone in it. Eventually, the harmful effects of her research become too much for Miriam, and she devises a secret plan to destroy the system from within, endangering her own life. But is her “confession” honest—or is it a fabrication riddled with lies meant to conceal the truth?

This SciFi alternate reality begins with the “cobblers flu” better known as Spanish Influenza and the war creating the Great Reckoning. It spans the time through rebuilding many, many years later. Miriam‘s loss of her entire family at a young age leaves her to fend for herself during an apocalyptic time. Initially finding refuge with a group of wayward girls savaging for food and shelter until she is arrested and imprisoned in Belgium. In prison Elsa befriends her teaching her a form of meditation, the Watercolor Quiet. She utilizes the Watercolor Quiet to help traumatized children at the Arboretum. Within the New Society, Dr. Miriam Gregory’s work with trauma, the brain for a system of social and political governance that would be hard to fathom today. Her visionary psychology, the Watercolor Quiet, becomes bigger than her work at the Gateway School for Wayward Youth. This takes her on a path that ultimately leads to her disappearance, until her manuscript are found in a bedsit.

Dr. Greggory’s memories and documentations are perfectly woven together by the authors. This fictional dystopian historical autobiography leaves you thinking, relishing in the history we know and weaving the journal writings into what could be. This story of what society would do to establish survival and peace will jerk its readers to the core for the haunting tales it hides. I highly recommend this book.

My copy of You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson, was provided by NetGalley and Harper Perennial and Paperbacks. In return, I will provide them with an honest review. The publication date is November 16, 2021.
Now that we have the particulars out of the way, you're probably wondering what I'm thinking about this book. Warning, this is going to be a short review.
To be upfront, I realized something as I was reading this book. See, I wasn't liking this one and I couldn't narrow down why. I started to think about it and it hit me. It's dystopian. Apparently, this is not my genre of storytelling. It does nothing for me.
So, as you can surmise, I didn't enjoy my reading experience. In fact, I DNF'd it. I will say this though, the writing style was great, the faux memoir concept was fantastic, and I liked the pacing. A big plus in its favor, you couldn't tell where one author started writing and the other ended, they flowed together so well. I just couldn't get past the whole dystopian thing, which is a shame.
I know there is an audience out there for this book. And I know people who would enjoy it, but it just wasn't for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Perennial for my DRC of this!

"You Feel It Just Below the Ribs" is a fictional nonfiction manuscript that I guess takes place in the podcast universe of "Within the Wires" and it centers around the author of the manuscript, Miriam. She tells us her background growing up in the Great Reckoning and after. I honestly was very enticed by the summary of this novel but reading it, I found myself really disliking it. I used to be a huge WTNV fan and had fallen out because of the fandom and the decrease in quality and I do think that this novel, while taking place in a different podcast universe, is indicative of that decrease in quality.

I thought the writing style was interesting but ultimately not readable especially for non-listeners of the podcast. I thought Miriam's earlier writings of her childhood was pretty straightforward and falls apart as she gets closer and closer to the end. Miriam as a character was not compelling for me; I found her to be boring and she felt unreal. She didn't feel grounded in any kind of reality and I just found myself really disliking her. I thought the narrative felt nonsensical at times and that just annoyed me. I've seen a lot of reviews saying that this is a book for people who are fine with no closure or straightforward narrative and honestly, I agree. This is not a book for people who want a story. This is a book for fans of the podcast and while I think that's fine, it definitely is not for a non-listener.

All in all, I just did not enjoy this book. I was super disappointed and continued to be disappointed the more I read.

I absolutely love the Within the Wires podcast. The structure is so unique, with the changing storytelling method every season, and the building of the Society as a concept is simply astounding in its writing quality. The same cannot be said for this book. While I appreciate the backstory of the Great Reckoning and the founding of the Society, I found Miriam to be fairly boring as a main character and a lot of the story really lagged. This is even more noticeable than it should be, because the ending felt so rushed. I also feel like it was almost too subtle in what was happening; the only real action was in the tapes that Hilda sent. I don’t think this is readable and less you like the podcast. That being said, I think the intro, conclusion, and footnotes were actually the most interesting part of the entire story. I kind of wish we would’ve had more Interludes by the editor, because that’s where the Society really showed its teeth.

Despite falling away from the show recently, I still consider myself to be a big fan of Welcome to Night Vale and pick up all the books written by its creators, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor—in fact, you may well have noticed a book from the former in this year’s Middle-Grade Halloween Reading Roundup. You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is written by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson, the co-creators of the podcast Within the Wires. The book is technically set within the same universe but you don’t need to have listened to any episodes of the show to make sense of the book.

The book takes the form of a fictional autobiography written by Dr. Miriam Gregory. It is largely chronological but with large gaps where months or even multiple years are missing, and it is filled with footnotes from the book’s supposed publisher that add historical context to Miriam’s words. The autobiography spans multiple decades beginning with her childhood around the 1920s, however, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is an alternative history novel and so Miriam’s birth around 1912 coincides with the official start date of the Great Reckoning—an event we would consider to be the apocalypse. Growing up, therefore, in a post-apocalyptic world, we are first introduced to the hardships Miriam faced trying to fend for herself in a barren wasteland from a very young age. It is during her teens that she is introduced to a form of meditation she calls the Watercolor Quiet, and it is this that forms the spine of this novel/her life story.

Miriam discovers that the Watercolor Quiet can be used to effectively detach memories—a boon to a society filled with traumatized individuals and particularly children. The New Society, a worldwide government formed after the Reckoning, brings in new laws that forbid “anything that may cause tribal loyalties, including traditional families,” and Miriam finds herself at the heart of its efforts to enforce this, unwittingly dragged into a sinister government research program. However, the footnotes throughout the book point out that Miriam’s account varies wildly from established facts and often contradicts the notoriously transparent government’s records, which then begs the question—who is telling the truth?

You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is not the book for anyone who likes to come out of a novel knowing exactly what happened and how everything fits together. Throughout the whole thing, you are constantly left questioning what is true and what is not. While this is especially apparent in the final section, where Miriam comes into conflict with the people around her, even the earlier sections of the book are filled with doubt as events Miriam recounts fail to appear in any official records and it isn’t always clear what part of the world she is supposed to be in at any given point. She often recalls spending time with certain people who are well known in this alternative universe but recalls them doing and saying things that seem so wildly out of character to those editing the manuscript that they begin to wonder if she is actually writing an elaborate piece of fiction rather than an autobiography.

While many elements of this book are intensely difficult to read, I imagine more so for parents than any other group, I did love that Miriam is unambiguously portrayed as an LGBTQ woman right from the start. We even get to meet her wife and see a period of happy domestic life between them, although admittedly not for long in a book covering such a wide expanse of time. Parents will almost certainly find this story difficult to stomach at points given the New Society’s outlawing of family units and what that means for those with children, however, this is one of those stories that will give you a lot to think about.

Our society is increasingly tribalistic: Republican vs Democrat, Remain vs Leave, with people clustering themselves around certain strongly held beliefs on subjects like abortion or vaccine mandates and seeing themselves as part of a group who are fighting a righteous war against the opposing viewpoint. It is often said that in order to regain a more peaceful and less antagonistic society we need to reduce this type of tribalism, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs shows what could happen if that idea was taken to its own extreme.

Deeply interesting and addictive to read. This alternative history book is perfect for spooky season, with echoes of our own reality playing like shadows in the background.

Every book is a construction, to some degree, between the author(s) and their reader; it’s part of why we react so strongly when the movie adaptations get things “wrong.” You Feel It Just Below The Ribs is a beautiful example of how just the right amount of ambiguity can pull the reader into engaging more completely with the story.

It starts almost simply; the introduction explains that we’re reading the autobiography of Dr. Miriam Gregory, mind behind some of the core tenets of the somewhat ominously named New Society. There are frequent footnotes accompanying the text, explaining concepts or providing further context on locations and people. But it’s not too long before all the familiar frames start to slip – the cities have the same names as we’re familiar with in reality, but it’s clear history took a different course; the academic footnotes turn defensive, critical, even outright mocking at times; and the narrator herself seems to be telling us only parts of what’s going on.

Through it all, however, there is the consistency provided by some beautiful writing – not flowery, straightforward, but still containing some sentences that just felt like simple perfection. Readers already familiar with the authors’ works, or the Within the Wires podcast which created the universe this novel is based in, won’t be too surprised by that. Deceptively deep simplicity – backed by moments of horror both existential and plausible – is a trademark of both Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson; working together seems to bring out the very best in both of them. If you’re not up to date, or completely new to their podcast, you won’t need to be current to get into this book; I went in deliberately blind and had no problem keeping up.

You Feel It Just Below The Ribs is thought-provoking, more than a little melancholy, and ultimately one of the most intriguing novels I’ve read this year. What a quietly wonderful book.

I loved the premise of this book! In a post-apocalyptic society that has begun to rebuild, we examine an expansion of a meditation technique - the watercolor quiet. Journeying into this world, one can rewire their neural pathways. To take things further, people begin to adopt this practice... and abuse it. But if you know me, you know that I hate footnotes... For this book, I almost tolerated it. But I don't think it worked. Presented with an unreliable narrator, I knew from the get-go that we could only trust so much of what she said. I felt like the interludes from the "publisher" were more useful in introducing the conflicting accounts. But if footnotes are for you, definitely try this one on for size.

*Thank you to Harper Perennial and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review*