Sandrine's parents are dead-or they are about to be. Her father, certainly; her mother, not quite yet. Alone and suffering from an incurable disease, the eleven-year-old girl finds companionship in her doctor, Tiresias, who morphologically changes sex in unpredictable ways and seemingly without anyone noticing. The Neptune Room, a melancholic tale about the mysteries of identity and the power dynamics associated with it, opens a door unto a universe of agonies: the long agony of an entire civilization and, microscopically, the spectrum of pain experienced by a young girl and those around her. Voicing anguish and perpetual mourning, The Neptune Room is a poetic novel, at once artful and compassionate, kaleidoscopic in its chronology, and resoundingly somber. It is about change, great and small, and all the little deaths along the way-both public and private. It embodies a puncto reflexionis, a turning point piecing together the tender, terrible, unmistakable puzzle that is life.
