i am so sorry but what did i just read. this book needed some HEAVY editing before being published. grammar mistakes all over the place. the pacing was trash. nothing was fleshed out. ALSO THE ARTWORK WAS STOLEN FROM WHYN LEWIS. i did not buy any part of this. his dog for SEVEN years? be so fucking for real. 2 stars for the plot because it had potential to be good as a short story or as a deep dive into the psychological and physical transformation but unfortunately it was neither of those so it was a big fat miss for me. just 214 pgs of what felt like a half baked idea. (w)oof. misled yet again by a beautiful cover!!

edit: did a google search and found a reddit post about this book. people think AI wrote it bc it is so bad and had awful formatting, repetitive phrasing, on top of the other reasons i also mentioned above. someone even put it into an AI text detector and it said it was highly confident it was AI generated. you cannot make this shit up (unless you're AI)

babe wake up new favorite book just dropped!! love and loss and a whirlwind of hedonism. delightful!

so many good lines in here but here are some fave excerpts:

"i wished that heaven were real to me, and wondered why it was not, to me or any contemporaries i knew. the victorians had been able to leave things to god - or the next generation. but the sound of guns and the knowledge of the immediacy of death and the desire to live as swiftly as possible, in the little time that youth and capacity to live swiftly, lasted - had got between that next generation and any whisperings of angels. perhaps that was it - it did not matter why, really - we had to get on without heaven as best we could."

"i wondered what he was thinking, and i thought, 'it is not true that in time, one 'gets over' almost anything. in time, one survives almost anything."

"and some absurd remnant of belief in miracles curled up and died in me, almost painlessly." (oof, what a zinger)

A new all-time favorite!! I am so grateful for McNallys for republishing this classic, and for Ursula Parrott to document the experiences of a modern woman nearly 100 years ago.

Patricia, 24, finds herself alone after her husband decides their progressive marriage is /too/ much for him. She now must learn what it means to be an Ex-Wife (her and her crew of divorcees muse “An ex-wife is a young woman for whom the eternity promised in the marriage ceremony is reduced to three years or five or eight.”)

So charming, charismatic, and heartbreaking, Patricia is a beacon in the canon of “Sad Girl Lit”.

The ending stirred similar emotions as “My Antonia” did (another all-time fav) and I ended up crying at the end. Brilliant til the end, what a gem