Eve is in a relationship with her girlfriend Romi and she’s in love with her, but at the same time she feels the need for more. That’s the reason why one day she posts some nude pictures of herself on social media, and she gets a message from a stranger, Olivia, asking her to meet. When she goes to meet Olivia, though, she realises that the woman is in a deeply complex relationship with a charming man, Nathan, and the three of them start to meet in secret. After a while, Eve begins to question Nathan’s intentions and she suspects he might be manipulative, but she suppresses her worries, at least until life won’t push her to make a decision.

This book left me with lots of food for thought. It made me think about the delicate balance between healthy and unhealthy relationships, and it also posits interesting questions about consent and sexuality. At the same time, the novel felt somewhat flat, as if there wasn’t enough movement in it. Some sentences are truly beautiful, but the prose is generally quite static. I’d say I appreciated what the book was trying to achieve more than I actually enjoyed it. It’s an interesting read, but I do think it could be altogether more enjoyable.

•thanks to #netgalley and the publisher for the #ARC in exchange for an honest review•

a very…. interesting book? i honestly don’t know what words i’d used to describe it. i was definitely hooked and it was spicy & queer but i just have a bunch of question marks in my brain trying to process what that was HAHAHA

i am never happier than when i feel special.

i’m a longstanding opponent of the not like other girls trope (i’m on the record since like 2015, which means this hatred significantly outlives most of my opinions, relationships, and sweaters), but i do like to be unlike other people. i turn the average meal-to-dessert ratio on its head. i stan dunkin over starbucks. i am in the midst of a lifelong quest to have the single most disturbing sleep schedule i can.

and of course, above all, i am an appreciator of a good unpopular opinion.

however.

i don’t think my opinion of this book should be unique.

this book has a devastating 3.19, and this is in spite of being complete perfection from beginning to end.

i picked up a library ebook of this, and while several of my very favorites in the world loved this book, i kinda expected to 3.5 it and move on into my resting state of complete forgetting as soon as possible.

instead, i found myself highlighting swaths of text, almost buzzing with that oh my god is this is a five star this might be a five star feeling, resonating with the emotions depicted and stunned by how lovely and clear the writing was.

and then i finished it, bought a copy, and reread and annotated it barely a week after reading it for the first time.

it’s really an easy five star, filled with taboo topics and fascinating characters and revealing dynamics. it’s about love and sex, gender and power, and how to find yourself or even know what that would look like. it’s about searching for happiness and meaning while being unable to admit that’s what you’re doing.

it’s everything that i think about the most.

bottom line: read it!!!

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reread update

nothing says five star read like rereading after a week

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pre-review

never happier than when i love a book everyone hates :)

review to come / 4.5 or 5 stars

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tbr review

the best thing that can possibly happen to a person is when they get very into a subgenre that is also simultaneously the single most trendy and common subgenre there is.

i am going to live forever

DNF, 33%. I literally could not take how pretentious this book is; i’m like, it’ll get better probably, right? But a quarter way through it still read like some open source online smut with genuinely unlikable characters and the strangest take on gender dynamics… i’m good!

If I could have been able to pretend that Nathan was Tyrell Wellick from Mr. Robot then this would have been 5 stars.

Was fun to read - otherwise kind of banal. Enjoyed the ending

kinda torn bc i wanted to rly like this book but i just couldnt fully connect to it. it poses interesting questions and nuanced discussions of sexuality/pleasure/relationships but i do wish this had been about a wlw relationship. i know why it wasnt — it wouldn’t be the same story at all — but im automatically repulsed by cishet men.

Acts of Service is an internal question of choice and responsibility, not just to ourselves but to our desires.

I wanted so much more from this. I found Eve posting the picture of herself (the catalyst for the rest of the book’s events) to be a more interesting exploration of sex and feminism than the whole relationship between Nathan and Eve (the rest of the contents of the book). Their dynamic is tired and Eve rarely extrapolates anything of substance from it— we get pages of worship for this man with almost no reflection from any source. Even if Eve is meant to be too deep within the relationship to offer us anything, we should be getting it from other devices: another character, motifs, symbols, anything. It’s a good concept and Nathan’s manipulation is skillfully done, but it feels pointless without analysis and introspection. Basically, this feels like telling a story only for the sake of telling it, not to say anything about women’s sexuality (as it’s advertised to do).