Before this summer, I really did not read. So I don’t want any judgment when I say this is the first LGBT book I’ve ever read. I even missed the whole Call Me By Your Name train – something I would feel bad about but I’ve decided Armie Hammer’s cannibalism accusations give me coverage for. This book is about women. Two women. I didn’t think I would enjoy reading from the perspective of such a flawed character. Flawed isn’t my choice of word. I signed up to a book recommendation website the other day and next to “books I don’t want to read” was a little box that said: “Flawed Characters”. I shouldn’t have been so quick to tick the box. I thought it would lead me to dramatic books from the perspective of people with lots of heavy trauma to unpack, or crime stories with murderers and stuff. Neither of which I wanted to read. Anyways this book has flawed characters. The narrator is a bisexual woman. She becomes completely obsessed with Finn. Finn reminds me of Shane, from the L word. The whole thing reminds me of the L word. Because practically no men feature. It’s all women. I thought that was a silly comparison. But I just typed the book into google a moment ago to check the author’s spelling and a Buzzfeed article came up entitled: “This Woman Wrote a Book with Almost No Male Characters” and it references the L word too. If BuzzFeed is making the comparison it may be a sillier observation than i thought.

Anyways it would seem that a continuous cycle of complete problematic obsession between two people is something Chloe Caldwell writes very convincingly about. Their relationship, when good, felt like a very calm picnic by the sea in Brighton on one of those days when you wish you’d brought a coat but didn’t. And it felt like horrible stormy weather when it was bad. I guess the word I’m looking for there is tempestuous but it’s too big a word for me. I read the book in very few sittings, and was completely immersed each time. I’m not sure I’m convinced by the book’s title. This book was about two people, an affair, and not much else. Of course there’s more than two characters but really everything that isn’t about Finn is about Finn. So I’m not sure this book is about women. I mean, it isn’t about women in the general sense of the word. It’s about two specific women. Except there were a few extracts about the narrator’s mother, which I very much liked.