Book Description
A young woman moves from the countryside to the city and falls in love with another woman for the first time in in her life. Finn is nineteen years older than her, wears men’s clothes, has a cocky smirk of a smile – and a long-term girlfriend…
My Thoughts
This novella is a swift read at just 130 pages. Told in the first person voice of our unnamed protagonist, a young writer who moves to the city to escape her growing drug habit. She quickly transfers her attention and affection to Finn a cool, older woman and an intense sexual relationship follows.
I liked this book which I read in a day, easy to read it focuses on the rocky relationship between the two women, which is characterised by an intensity of feelings but seems doomed from the outset. Finn has a long term partner who she lives with and there is never a suggestion that she will leave her. The affair is brief but passionate, for our narrator it is her first sexual relationship with a woman and leads her to question what she thought about herself and her sexuality. The newness of this experience perhaps adds weight to the affair and impacts on our protagonist’s inability to extricate herself.
Unable to make a relationship work, the two women struggle to detach from each other, such is the strength of their feelings, that said their connection quickly becomes harmful and toxic as the pair try to retain a distance in recognition of the hurt they cause each other.
Essentially a book about an impossible relationship, exploring sexuality and female love although I don’t think the break up and the struggles associated with that were necessarily specific to female relationships. A sad little story about something so special but essentially doomed. I liked the shortness of this book which I chose to read between two longer novels.
Thank you to the publisher for gifting me a copy of this book at an event and thank you all, as always for reading.
About the Author
Chloe Caldwell is the author of the essay collections I’ll Tell You in Person and Legs Get Led Astray. She teaches creative nonfiction at Catapult in New York City, and lives in Hudson, New York.
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