Review by Booklist Review
Jules is home with a newborn and someone very important is missing. But first, the backstory. Lonesome twentysomething Jules felt like her life itself was pretty rundown when she showed up at the sticky Brighton student club Gunk, thanks to a surprise invitation to a coworker's hen party. Turns out everyone was invited, but the only person there who mattered was Gunk's owner, Leon. Jules married Leon and became part of the Gunk family, stuck around for five years despite many misgivings, and eventually they divorced, with Jules still running Gunk's bar. When, years later, Leon hires young Nim to tend bar, Jules is surprised by her talent, work ethic, and reserved manner. Though Nim mostly dates women, she ends up pregnant. After solving the mystery of the baby and the missing woman for readers, Sams (Send Nudes, 2022) unravels much in the tense space between Jules and Nim as they wait for the baby to be born, attempting to face their plan--and each other. This psychologically acute debut novel breezes by in short chapters that carry heft.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Sams's intimate debut centers on a complicated relationship between two British women. It opens with Julia, the middle-aged narrator, caring for a newborn baby in Brighton, after the baby's mother, Nim, disappeared from the hospital. Julia reflects on how she wound up in the seaside party town at 18, desperate to escape the conventional life laid out for her by her "placid, attentive" parents. In flashbacks, she recounts falling for Leon, the charismatic and volatile owner of Gunk, a grimy nightclub, in her late 20s. What began as an adventure curdles into marriage, toil, and divorce, as Julia works behind the bar, propping up the failing venue and her now ex-husband, who continues to emotionally drain her. Her life tilts when Leon hires Nim, a teenage runaway. Julia is enchanted by Nim's unstudied confidence and impressed by her skill (she claims to have worked as a bartender since she was 14, having lied about her age). When Nim sleeps with Leon, Julia's feelings of betrayal expose the fragile dynamics between the trio. As the novel unfolds, Julia gradually reveals why Nim disappeared. Sams's writing is assured and muscular ("Sometimes I could grope around inside myself and come up surprised," Julia observes), and the novel subtly explores Julia's motivations in caring for the baby and what a happy family might look like. This is striking. Agent: Nicola Chang, David Higham Assoc. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two English women--a self-sufficient nightclub manager and a teenage bartender--become bound by pregnancy and struggle to find a place in each other's lives. Jules is in her 30s and still running Gunk, the Brighton nightclub owned by her sleazy ex-husband, Leon. After watching him sleep with students again and again during and after their marriage, she warns the club's new hire, 18-year-old Nim, to stay away from him. But Nim, who has a way "of leaning into an impulse, then following it through to the end," hooks up with him anyway. A condom breaks, the morning-after pill fails, and she ends up pregnant with the baby Jules always wanted but never got. As a narrator, Jules is distant, the whole novel falling into a retrospective tone that's rarely disrupted. Even her most intense motivation, the desire to have a child, is passive; she never explicitly tries to have one, never visits a fertility clinic, never commits to IVF or adoption. As a character, her motivations are sometimes obscure: It's hard to imagine what she ever saw in Leon. That said, Sams shines in the details, never shying away from the unsavory, gunky side of life. She also paints a compelling picture of Nim: her shaved head, her tracksuits, and the quirky personality that drives her to give pebbles to Jules and her parents at Christmas. Perhaps the greatest strength of the novel is the questions it asks about family and relationships, filtered through Jules and her doubt: "I was determined to think of myself as above other people. Was this why I wanted a baby? Was this why other people kept on having babies?…We wanted a chance to build a destiny, from day one." A vivid, reflective exploration of parenthood, personhood, and desire. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
