Death Valley

A Novel

By: Melissa Broder

Narrated by: Melissa Broder

Length: 5 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

From the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief and a “magical tale of survival” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

In Melissa Broder’s astonishingly profound new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path discovered on a nearby hike.

Out along the sun-scorched trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious, and poignant.

Death Valley is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest, and is “a journey unlike any you’ve read before” (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black).

©2023 Melissa Broder (P)2023 Simon & Schuster Audio

Nice, Short Read

If you like listening to NPR, this is a great book for you. Both the story and the narrator remind me of This American Life.

Strong voice

Our narrator was funny and had one foot squarely in mundanity and one in fantasy

Love the poetic language about humanness, love and death

Not my usual style of book to read. But I enjoyed it. I really like Melissa's poetic style, easy to follow prose, honesty, self reflection and relatability. While the trippy cactus stuff is not my thing, I could relate to the spirituality search of it all-- the search for the meaning of life, love and oneself. I had a chronically sick mother and wrestled with all the same feelings of rage and guilt and love. I also lost my father in 2019 and was very close with him. We can all hopefully relate to the death and the feelings surrounding the loss of a parent. If we do that means we have outlived our parents-- which is the way it is supposed to go. I really, really liked Milkfed. I really liked this book. I should give her first book another try. I commend Broder's honesty and relatable humanness. I like her introspection and humor. Give her a try. I also commend her on trying different genres
and styles of writing and taking a risk. That is living!

Broder is the perfect narrator!

I experienced a rocky start with this one. At first, I was turned off by some raunchy language. I just wasn’t in the mood. Reading reviews made me want to go back.

I’m happy that I did return to the story. After I turned off my “crabby lady” inner voice and listened to the story, I became intrigued. The unnamed narrator’s babbling has a deep well producing that babble.

She is a 40-something married novelist who feels she is dry of ideas. Her father is in the ICU after a devastating car crash. She is worried about her father dying. Her husband is housebound and disabled. She is stressed. So, she decides to take a short trip to Death Valley for inspiration. She expects a desert-based epiphany.

She checks herself into a Best Western. (Thank you, author Broder, for the quirky characters and abundant hotel humor.) After much self-babble, she determines a long walk in the desert might inspire her. She’s a spiritual seeker after all. She perceives “wandering around in the desert, there’s no need to play hard to get with God”. Of course there will be a fork in the road..

There’s a cactus. There are bunnies. A vicious teen bunny. There are stones, all colors. But it’s in the cactus that Broder’s imagination shines. Broder does a great job with the narrator’s self-rumination which are critical with some therapy self-talk thrown in. Her are observations unique and brilliant.

This is a meditation on loss and grief. It’s clever.

Tone of Story Was a Difficult to Figure Out Until Too Late

This made it hard to know how to take the author/character. Was it satire? Was she delusional? Clearly a little neurotic at the very least. And the profound moments came, but they were a bit too little too late. I lost my husband last year and did find some understanding and redemption in myself as a caregiver. So in that regard it was insightful. But just overall slightly off/delayed/lacking. Why do I feel as if this book will eat at me and I’ll listen again in hopes of a better understanding. The narration was on point!

Monumentally Terrible

I finish every book I start. Never was that resolve so sorely tested as with Death Valley.

I would only recommend this book to a friend who had an immediate and critical need for paper; to be used for sanitary purposes.

Couldn't tell if she was on an acid trip

I like the voice of the narrorator but the story was just such a struggle to get through. I thought this was going to be more of a fantasy book where she gets lost inside this cactus and goes into a whole other world. But definitely not that. Maybe thats why it was so hard to get through. it was like a combination of never ending story and someone on an acid trip but with out the bright colors. Nothing made sense and hard to follow. I will not read this book again that's for sure.

Boring

I listened for quite a while, but nothing grabbed my interest. Yes, I feel sorry for the main character, but that wasn’t any good reason to continue, so I did not finish. 

What a Waste

The author takes self-indulgence and reader patience to new levels. Granted perhaps the point was to let us flail with her through her lack of consciousness, lack of empathy and lack of regard for all her fellow characters - from the struggling physical health of her father and husband, the dive-bombing mental health of herself, her mother and to every human she encounters.

Thankfully the her handling of characters from the animal and mineral kingdom were creative and interesting but her insistence on anthropomorphizing them, revealed yet another level of author failings.

That the reader is expected to find any empathy at all for her naval gazing in a sea of shortcomings is laughable. But this is not a comedy, this is a thirty something woman from L.A. who walks into the desert without a map and can only tell time or direction home from a cell phone that goes dead mid-way through her ordeal. Her saga is a sad testament to an age of knowledge that seems to stem only from connectivity to the internet and an author who can’t read the simple direction of a rising and setting sun. This is a dry gulch of a read without a secret spring in sight.

Pretty Description of Nature

This book was not my cup of tea. I felt it was slow and drawn out. Nice descriptions of nature.