I was there, on the Indonesian Book Twitter community, when this book dropped. It was freshly baked, and everyone in my timeline seemed to pre-ordered it together and read it immediately. Not me, though. It took me months after its release to buy this book. Mainly because 1) I have this book-buying-ban agenda running, and 2) I didn’t have spare money for buying any book, so, yeah.

When I finally bought it (and broke my own book-buying-ban policy) I didn’t immediately read it because I was still reading other books. It sat there in my bookshelves for another two months before I finished Norah Lange’s People in the Room, thus leaving a room (no pun intended) for me to read this book.

(Please note that the English translation here is all done by me, and by the time this review is posted, there is no information about its official English translation yet.)

What is it?

Kita Pergi Hari Ini atau Tempat-Tempat Indah dalam Mimpi-Mimpi Anak-Anak Baik-Baik (We Are Going Today or Nice Places in the Nice Kids’ Dreams) is a fantasy fiction novel, and I’m thinking so hard how to classify it into a specific fantasy subgenre. I would say this is a combination of dark fantasy and folklore (because of the animal elements inside.) (Also I would go as far as classifying this as satire if I want to read into it too deeply lol. But, no. Not now.)

Kita Pergi Hari Ini, or what I will further refer as KPHI, is written by Ziggy Zezsyazeoviennazabrizkie. She has published more than twenty-five books by now, and KPHI is her most recent novel (only followed by Tiga Dalam Kayu, which is, technically, an anthology.)

You can visit its Goodreads page here or read my poor attempt to summarize the book: the story is about five good kids, actual good-mannered kids, who come from a set of exhausted and poor parents, who are, in attempt to help themselves with the kids, trying to find Another Way to solve their problem, and that is to send their kids an Extraordinary Cat to look after them. The story continues with these five nice children going on an adventure with this Extraordinary Cat; visiting beautiful and equally extraordinary places—only for them to realize that something wrong is going on.

The book is sectioned into five big parts: Kota Suara (City of Noises), Perjalanan (The Journey), Kota Terapung Kucing Luar Biasa (The Floating City of Extraordinary Cat), Jalur Cahaya (The Light Path), and Rumah Merah No. 17 (The Red House No. 17) These sections are telling the children’s story, from their background (why they are being sent at the first place), to how they get to the Floating City, until how they get back to their own house, all in that order.

The Reading

I had zero expectations before I started! Yes, I read people’s quick review about it: the plot twists are great! Don’t be fooled by the title and the blurb! And, yet I still didn’t know what to expect. Hey, what’s the worst that can happen with a talking cat and a bunch of Nice Kids? A lot, apparently.

This book will take you from the sweet, shiny, happy garden of flowers into the smelly and dark sewer in only several hundred pages. No, it doesn’t happen rapidly—you will get there, eventually, because you are also as oblivious as the children, and you are forced to believe what the children believed too, because you didn’t know anything! Yet!

During the reading, I didn’t underline and highlight too many things, but, again, if you want to read it too deeply, there are lots of quotes that you can take out of context and apply it to, coughs, real life situations. Aside from those possible-double-layered quotes, there are also Other Quotes that are either 1) very interesting, or 2) very disturbing.

Truthfully, I finished this in the span of a month—mainly because I speed read it until the beginning of the third section, abandoned it for weeks because I simply couldn’t find the time to sit down and read, and then read the rest of it for three days.

And the fact that I finished this in The Spooky Season is very Spookish of me. I am very glad. It was exactly at 11.20 p.m., I was in my bed, all the lamps were off except for the study lamp, and reading the very last line was like “oooh shit, this is so fucked up. But not really. But understandable. But so fucked up.”

I don’t remember when was the last time I read something so delightfully disturbing story like this, but I can say it is long enough so this one genuinely surprised me, in a good way.

What made me “Ooh!”

Aside from the twists, I like how Miss Galaxy Brain Ziggy foreshadowed everything at the beginning. It reminds me of something Jonathan Sims and Alexander J. Newall, the creator of a horror fiction podcast, The Magnus Archive, had said, paraphrased—the point is not to twist the story as it goes just to make your reader/listener cannot predict the ending, despite all the foreshadows that you have dropped earlier in the story. It is more about how to make your reader/listener go “ah, so that’s why!”

I am not going to write the big spoiler here, but I want to say that everything at the beginning is going to be explained at the end, and actually you can already guess the history if you put one and one together. Well, that is the purpose of a foreshadow, isn’t it?

I also enjoy reading the footnotes so much! Miss Ziggy wrote it as if there is a whole established universe for the setting, explaining how something was done or what is the history of a peculiar event—there are journals and news and books—and the pun of the author’s name! She wrote something like a book called Almanak Segala Rasa (Almanac of Every Flavor) and the author is Mak Anmulu; if we mess with the spacing we can find Makan Mulu (always eat) hahahaha. There are a bunch of footnotes like this throughout the novel.

What made me “Eh,”

Surprisingly, I have no complaints for now! The whole story feels smooth, and the writings are nice and easy to follow. Maybe people will be kind of turned off by the way she writes a lot of things in plural, and since Indonesian doesn’t have the extra ‘-s’ at the end of plural things, she writes it twice. For example, the subtitle: tempat-tempat indah dalam mimpi-mimpi anak-anak baik-baik. There are two ‘tempat’ and two ‘mimpi’ and two ‘anak’ and two ‘baik’ here hahaha, but that’s just how Indonesian works, so, yeah.

Overall,

At last, I rate this book five out of five for the dark fantasy, the adventure, and the way Fifi screamed Fufu’s name at the end of the book [smiles menacingly]. Though I will not recommend this book to people who don’t like gory and disturbing themes. Some scenes and narration can be a little bit squeamish for some people.