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A review by lauraanne_
Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman
3.0
I really wanted to love this book, and I liked it… but I didn’t love it. I went into it with an expectation that it was going to be a sapphic love story, and was disappointed by the fact that it wasn’t (my fault). Some of the characters were so unlikable (I’m talking about Nathan and Olivia specifically…), although I did like Eve’s character and I just feel pretty bad for poor Roni lol. I didn’t hate the fact that the characters were unlikable, but I just didn’t love that it was basically a story about these two women fawning over this weird ass man!!!!!! There were a lot of interesting and introspective topics that came up about sexuality, relationships, sex, and desiring something that you can’t have or know you shouldn’t have. Discovering that this book was about bisexuality and the socially constructed idea that bisexual women having sex with men (in addition to women) is often overly sexualized or a ‘classic porn search’ was interesting and I was excited to read a narrative about that! But it didn’t really dive too deep into that… it felt more like a story about a bisexual woman realizing that she wanted to have sex with a man, ruining her current relationship because of that, and then ultimately realizing that having sex with a man wasn’t really what she wanted. Although, I did really love the detailed descriptions of emotions and sex — there are some really beautifully written parts in this book.
Overall, I think my expectation of this story was its downfall, which is a fault of mine, not of the book. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in stories about fucked up relationships and bisexuality. It held my attention pretty well in the beginning, but then I got a little bored of it, and then enjoyed reading it again at the end.
Overall, I think my expectation of this story was its downfall, which is a fault of mine, not of the book. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in stories about fucked up relationships and bisexuality. It held my attention pretty well in the beginning, but then I got a little bored of it, and then enjoyed reading it again at the end.