my love language is acts of service too.

i cant believe this is a debut novel. im going to be keeping my eye on lillian fishman from now on. every sentence was an absolute pleasure to read even if i felt completely agonized in that moment. i was so immersed in the story that whenever other characters referred to the narrator, eve, as she or her i would instinctively flinch. i completely identified with eve, something i almost never feel while reading, and i think it has something to do with the way dialogue is handled in acts of service.

there are no quotation marks. you can quite easily tell who is speaking even though everyone sounds exactly the same....which sounds horrible. if anything the sameness of the dialogue and prose makes it sound more like youre inside eves head at all times. everyone elses words filter through eves consciousness and you cant tell whats real or whats in her head. the perception of other characters is strictly through eves point of view. when someone behaves out of character its not because theyre acting out but its because you as the reader are firmly trapped in eves perspective. you have no possible way of knowing what anyone else but eve is thinking. it all feels very real and true to how life is. its obviously written in first person but in the tightest first person imaginable. i wouldnt call it stream of consciousness because it obviously isnt but it really feels like you are completely inside your own head. when someone addresses eve directly you feel like theyre talking to you.

i absolutely cannot stand romance and tend to skip over romantic and sex scenes if theyre too sappy. this is a book about relationships without romance. there is plenty of sex and intense feelings but you couldnt call it romantic by any stretch of the imagination. and the sex is frequent but intense and often plot relevant, though im not the kind of person who needs every scene to forward the plot. a lot of it is just setting up the dynamic between the characters and their personalities. at one point a sex scene occurs to set up something that happens later on in the book with serious legal ramifications....

now i guess i have to talk about the books view of sexuality and queerness. acts of service is compulsory heterosexuality: the novel. eve is bisexual and is almost exclusively interested in women but very early on you notice the magnetic pull nathan has on her. over the course of the novel she spends more and more time with him at the expense of being with anyone else. nathan is an obsession she shares with olivia, a shy artist who is quiet yet intense. im keeping this vague and brief because there is a lot to these characters and you actually dont learn a lot about the until halfway through the book. with olivia, you barely start to get to know her until the very end when everythings starting to wrap up.

as for the ending, there really isnt much of a conclusion. it just ends but it cant really end with any satisfaction. this is about an uneasy throuple and its consequences for everyone involved, including those outside the relationship. there can be no true resolution. it either fades out or ends in tragedy. ill leave it up to you to decide how it ends.