As Natalie looks back on the relationship, she sees her own innocence clearly: “I had been much younger then, hadn’t I?” This insightful novel is alive with vibrant prose, emotional acuity, and complex female characters.Ī meditation on what it means to step into your authentic self-with all the subsequent confusion and pain laid bare.Įxes pretend they’re still together for the sake of their friends on their annual summer vacation.
While the denouement is in no way shocking, it's satisfyingly dramatic, and Fischer encourages the reader to remember their own first heartbreak.
What runs consistently through the novel is the unease of the age and power disparities between Natalie and Nora. She struggles to reconcile her seemingly disparate selves-embarrassed when she finds out that Nora has seen her playing a game of Assassin with her college friends, not knowing how to tell Clara she’s a lesbian, mortified by the dichotomy between her thoughts and the poetry she produces (“Such a slim margin between saying something meaningful and exposing the fallibility of your mind”)-Natalie becomes increasingly fraught with self-doubt. When she meets Nora, a grant writer in her 30s who quickly captivates her, she’s prompted to reappraise her self-image: “Who was I, if she was curious about me? Not the person I’d expected myself to be.” Their physical relationship is revelatory for Natalie: “Didn’t I like being dipped into, the breaking surface of myself that still rippled from the afterthought of her touch?” Alongside Natalie’s romantic relationship run a platonic one she has with her dorm-mate Clara and one she witnesses unfold between her poetry professor and an obsessive classmate. One that could quickly show the core elements of my character.” As well as a new city, Natalie is navigating her hitherto unexplored sexuality. With college looming, Natalie stews about moving to Toronto, and Fischer captures teenage uncertainty brilliantly: “I wondered if I should buy a more specific jacket.
New college student Natalie falls in love with Nora, a woman nearly twice her age, in Fischer’s debut novel.
0 kommentar(er)
