The character connection was there but her character arc didn't cut it.
Rachel is a calorie-counting twenty-something in LA who falls for Miriam, the girl who works at her froyo shop. Rachel is somehow both terribly shallow and self-centered and also quite reflective, and I loved her. Very self-hating, and deeply familiar in that outsider-woman-with-a-rich-inner-life way.
I love a main character who is flawed but relatable in a “do I do this?” way. I liked My Year of Rest and Relaxation for the same reason. Like all the Hannah Horvaths before her, Rachel made me think: wow, I too am a millennial terror.
But the “journey” was shallow. I never felt the obsession with the froyo girl happening. It just happened, and then it was the plot of the entire book. I wanted a more drawn out “falling for Miriam” thread. The character connection was there but her character arc didn’t cut it.
Vibes
- strange, uncomfortable fiction
- self-hatred
- sapphic fantasy
- an outsider woman with a rich inner life
Favorite quotes
“I felt that our kissing could sustain the ritual of women loving women for eons to come.”
“My mother had never known me either, though it wasn’t because I hadn’t given her a chance. I’d given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn’t seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn’t even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.”
Would recommend to
Anyone who likes strange, uncomfortable fiction with a bit of self-hatred and sapphic fantasy. Any millennial woman who has ever counted calories, or who has woken up one day to realize that half her brain juice for the last 30 years was wasted on an obsession with thinness and the state of her body in the world.