Review by Booklist Review
London born and based Patel's debut arrives stateside already lauded and feted. Her novel is a barbed, gut-punch confession by a 30-year-old, unnamed narrator (her parents are Indian immigrants) obsessed with "a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as I am." She's consumed by "the man I want to be with" and the toxic web from which she can't, won't escape. He's older, wealthy, 20-years-married, although he readily admits he started cheating three years in. He baits and discards women all over the world--"he plays all of us off one another . . . It's clear he doesn't view women he is romantically interested in as a people"--but the narrator is especially obsessed with stalking the Instagram influencer in Mendocino (until she moves to Marfa) who offers meticulously curated, effortlessly presented snippets of lived perfection. Writing in scathing bursts, Patel mutates a predictable cliché into an implosive exposé of white privilege, gendered power dynamics, women-for-women hypocrisy, all pointing to a disheartening failure of human connections. An anti-Bridget Jones for the short-fused, screen-addicted generation.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"I stalk a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as I am," begins Patel's trenchant debut. The unnamed narrator, a young London woman of color, documents this infatuation triangle in a series of short prose pieces resembling online posts (one is titled "dick from someone who doesn't care if you live or die"). Her lover is a married writer, and the other woman is a wellness influencer. The relationship is emotionally masochistic; she describes him only as "the man I want to be with," and remarks, via the title of another entry, "i didn't miss the red flags i looked at them and thought yeah that's sexy." Among those red flags are the many other women in the writer's life, including the influencer, who's "the daughter of someone famous in America." Many of Patel's insights are breathtakingly keen, particularly when detailing how, as a person of color, the narrator is expected to lay her pain bare to receive the pleasure of belonging. At times, however, the barrage of barbs creates a wearying air of cynicism. Still, Patel acutely captures how identity and intimacy can feel both deepened and deadened in the Instagram era's attention economy. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A London woman is consumed with a married artist and his numerous lovers. The unnamed narrator of Patel's debut novel is in a love triangle of sorts. There is the character called only "the man I want to be with," who is married but has a number of women on the side, including "the woman I am obsessed with." The narrator and this woman have never met; the narrator hears about her secondhand from the man, and she spends hours screenshotting and mulling over the woman's carefully curated Instagram feed. This woman and the narrator are both side pieces--"What we should have done is unionise," says the narrator about the artist's "harem"--but the narrator has a boyfriend, too, whom she admittedly treats abysmally. (Perhaps this is more a love spiderweb than a love triangle?) Blisteringly self-aware, the narrator knows she is trapped in a cycle of desiring the things she hates the most: wealth, influence, fans, prestige, expensive objects. (There is plenty that comes in for unequivocal skewering, however: neoliberals, white women influencers, Trump supporters.) Threading through every action and emotion is the narrator's sense of her own relationship as a person of color to the white artist and his white paramours. Of the artist she writes, "It takes me a long time to realise that when the man I want to be with tells me he likes being seen with me in public what he means is, he enjoys what my skin colour says about him to other people." Patel is a member of the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE poetry collective, and there are echoes of poetic structure here, as in the way the very short chapters are each titled, like prose poems--and each driven by a mix of narrative and bellows of rage. Chaotic and cathartic. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
