I am so thankful to Catapult Books, Jesse Ball, and Netgalley for granting me advanced access to this galley before publication day. I really enjoyed the dialogue and plot of this book and can’t wait to chat this one up with my friends!

The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball is a wonderfully crafted dystopian novel.
I thought Balls writing was just amazing. My first time reading his work and I’m reeling at how rich and fulfilling it is.

Thank You NetGalley and Catapult for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this amazing eARC!

Hard to find anything to say about this book, which is so opaque, but Jesse Ball is a very good writer. The first half, which is Kafkaesque dystopian fiction, is excellently crafted to give just enough information that the reader feels the wide, unstable uncertainty of the world it describes. The second half is the bizarre and shocking story of a young man's life, having been trapped in his parents' home since birth and forced to participate in a bizarre and theatrical experiment. The novel is certainly disturbing, and will probably be offputting to many readers, especially in the second half, which draws heavily on an incestuous relationship. But the voice(s) are clear through the prose, which is very good, and although the philosophies the book seems to orbit around are sometimes unclear to me, I feel after finishing it that there's probably a path through that muddle somewhere if I were to reread it. A real curiosity.

This is one of the most disturbing things I've ever read. The first half of the novel is setting us up to fully understand the implications of the second half and what I read in the second half has gotten underneath my skin and probably won't ever leave. This nihilistic take on society is not for everyone, but wow.

Brilliant and disturbing, a dystopian tale about justice, brainwashing, abuse, gaslighting. Very uncomfortable to inhabit but impossible to not be affected by.

I never go into any Jesse Ball novel with the idea that I know what to expect from the story. The prose is always sparse and the novel always slight but the story itself always abounds with thoughtfulness and originality. The Repeat Room imagines a future where jurors are allowed to inhabit the mind of the accused so that they can better perceive their crime and pass judgement. Abel sees the accused's childhood and crime, both shocking and painful to inhabit. This book is definitely not for everyone, but there's a lot to consider in this slim volume.