BookBrowse Reviews Yr Dead by Sam Sax

The entirety of Sam Sax's debut novel, Yr Dead, takes place between the moment 27-year-old Ezra sets themself on fire in the streets of New York and the moment of their resultant death. Presented as a series of fleeting, non-linear vignettes, the novel plays very literally with the notion that our whole life flashes before our eyes just before we die. Ezra's memories of pain and joy as a queer, Jewish youth flood over them, and accumulate for the reader into a moving exploration of suffering and desperation.

Sax doesn't trace Ezra's depression, or their choice to end their life, back to any one root, but we do see how specific events have shaped their life. Ezra's mother abandoned her family when Ezra was young, which seems to have contributed to Ezra's self-loathing and constant, futile search for belonging. "Of the many kinds of grieving, we happen to be saddled with one where we, ...