In the Clouds

Marta Balcewicz’s debut novel, Big Shadow, begins with Judy, the seventeen-year-old narrator, describing her curious summer job before starting university: she has been entrusted by her cousin Christopher and his friend Alex to “watch the passing clouds.” She spends her days noticing how they “set themselves apart, by becoming shapes that had nothing to do with one another: wedding veils, curdled milk, trails of horse droppings perfectly spaced out.” And she carries a notebook in which to record the many differences. “That one went on its way,” she writes of one cloud. “There was nothing unusual in that one.” Judy’s nephological bona fides are deceptively simple. Christopher and Alex feel that she is “uniquely qualified to be the one who observed.”

Big Shadow is about perception, observation, and defamiliarizing the mundane world, whether through clouds or otherwise...