Book Specs 📖

• Author: Yael van der Wouden
• Genre: Historical/Literary fiction, LGBTQ+
• Pages: 258 (Paperback)

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Hot, (hungry, horny) girl summer in a house with a stolen secret.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• GURL, I did not expect to be this blown away by a book that I found at a ‘free book’ library stand. This was a fresh (erotic) take on the unspoken tragedies that we carry inside us, within the spaces we live, and how life has a funny way of making us surrender to the “truth”.
• The perfect execution of restraint and desire, contempt and vulnerability, tension and release, was POWERFUL AF. You could feel the heat emanating from the page, not only from the lascivious content, but from anger, desire, temperature…the “heat” was layered. Skilled writing!
• I loved how the author integrated the concept of space, especially the emotional associations of living in a home, and the history that it carries. We often see ourselves as distinct from the structures we live in when they are extensions of us. Leaving “home” is an emotional experience because it’s a part of ourselves we leave behind. It’s not about the walls, and the windows, the spoons, and the backyard, but also it very much is all of those things and how we relate to them. Must re-read Bachelard’s Poetics of Space again!
• Also, excuse me, but debut novel?? And shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024?? This was a delightfully exhilarating book to read and is a great reminder that there are so many books out there that are waiting to be discovered (I will find you!)

“Quotes”🗣

“She had held a pear in her hand and she had eaten it skin and all. She had eaten the stem and she had eaten its seeds and she had eaten its core, and the hunger still sat in her like an open maw.“

“I can hold you and find that I still miss your body. She thought: I can listen to you speak and still miss the sound of your voice. “

“You can think something that used to be true but isn’t true anymore but still believe it in your bones.“

“Isabel could cry at it: at how a room could be made, and left behind, and turn terrible by way of absence. How a space could miss a person…”