I received an advance e-copy of this book thanks to the publisher and NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
DNFed at 51%. This wasn’t unreadable but it was boring. I read as far as I did, hoping that more would happen but it didn’t and I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t enjoying the experience.
Our unnamed narrator is a youngish woman (I can’t remember if her age was stated; I imagined her in her early 30s) who is infatuated with a man she cannot be with. This man is married as well as having a string of other women. There is a woman in Mallorca who has a nice house. There is the woman the narrator is obsessed with, a moderately famous influencer who the narrator stalks online and then in real life. The narrator has a boyfriend that she (maybe?) lives with but has no compunctions about cheating on him (or aiding someone to cheat on their spouse). She has a job. She (maybe?) has friends. She refreshes this other woman’s instagram feed and thinks about the man she wants to be with. Rinse and repeat.
Reading books like this I often begin by feeling like I shouldn’t be unsympathetic to stories of young women who are drifting in life and who are unsuccessful in their relationships. I was 21 when I met my husband and became a parent at 29. Those things are certainly not the be all end all but they are seen as a certain type of marker in our society. I recognize that they are things many people desire and the fact that I have them involves a certain amount of pure dumb luck.
But this narrator isn’t just unlucky. She’s actively making bad decisions and she’s probably not a good person. Aside from just disliking her though, the stakes are incredibly low. We never really see her boyfriend on the page or their relationship so I don’t really care if they break up. It doesn’t seem like it would change her life much at all. The man she wants to be with is objectively awful and hateful to women so I don’t really care what happens to him. I want him to be alone because he’s terrible but being with the narrator also seems like a sort of punishment that he might deserve. The narrator has a job that she doesn’t seem very focused on but I don’t know anything about it so it doesn’t really matter if she loses it. She compares herself to this other woman, an influencer from a wealthy woman, and clearly doesn’t have as much money but she also doesn’t seem to be facing financial insecurity.
The one point that is moderately clear is that our narrator is a person of colour and none of the other characters are. (Though maybe the boyfriend is?) This could be an interesting angle and at one point the narrator says that she knows the man she wants to be with likes to be seen with her because she is a person of colour. I can’t speak on how that might make someone feel but it seems like a terrible sort of fetishization to me and another sign that this man is objectively terrible. But the narrator never examines this aspect of their relationship, at least as far as I made it.
And, no, nobody has names. Something that I think is becoming a pet peeve of mine in novels.
Karissa Reads Books 
“being with the narrator also seems like a sort of punishment that he might deserve” 😂 So cruel!
Having read half the book, I felt like I was being punished by having to spend time with the narrator and I do not deserve it the way this man does!
This does sound very tedious – well done for making it so far! (Also, I am single and childless, but I also find stories of young women making interminable bad decisions about relationships very boring, and often don’t have much sympathy for the main characters. I think it’s just a boring genre!)
I definitely don’t think you’d enjoy this book! As a topic, I’m not super interested in this sort of book but I think it can be done a lot better than this and so I try to go into books like this with an open mind. I thought at first someone with a more similar lifestyle to the narrator might find more of interest here but she is so unlikeable and alienating that I’m not sure who this book is for.
Un-named narrators (other than the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca) shouldn’t be allowed. It’s too hard to connect and care about these characters.
I tend to agree. Sometimes I can handle an unnamed narrator in a first person narration but when all the characters are unnamed, that pushes me over the edge!
My understanding is it was popular during the height of post-modernism to not use names, so I’m not sure why it’s back.
Drifting in life is totally a choice, a choice to not set even the tiniest goal. I’d rather read a book about someone setting a goal to start flossing than simply drifting (and probably complaining).
Yes, it always makes me think of Kafka. To me it doesn’t fit well in a book that is not otherwise surreal.
I’m sure this is realistic to some people’s lives but it’s not interesting to me to read.
That I can understand. The rest of the book must match the no-names.
I also hate it when authors choose to make everyone nameless. It feels almost disrespectful to the reader, it just makes things difficult to read, and its so unnnecessary! I don’t blame you for DNFing this one.
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