It reached out, ripped my heart out through my chest, threw it at the wall and left me staring into a huge abyss for twenty straight minutes. It is thrilling to read a book that articles with nuance and compassion the way gender impacts every part of our lives. There were very many characters in this book that I didn't like, but also I wasn't supposed to, but also even when I'm not supposed to I usually do anyway, often more than when I AM supposed to. She talks about being broke, drugs, alcohol abuse, childhood trauma, suicide, loss of friendship, mental health and multiple LGBTQ+ topics.

cleo and frank’s relationship is the strand which runs through everyone else’s lives, their tumultuous up and downs bleeding into the lives of their circle of friends and family. I overall highly recommend this book to anyone looking for something that will make your heart warm and shattered at the same time. Look I get that it's literary fiction and the literary fiction girlies will let an author do anything in the name of ~art.Mellors’ remarkably assured and sensitive debut … strongly evoke[s] Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life… At its core, it’s a novel about how love and lovers are easily misinterpreted and how romantic troubles affect friends and family. I, like every vaguely creative young person, have multiple diagnoses, but my brain chemistry failures never include installing art with my self harmed body at the center for my loved ones to find, I will tell you that. While not every sentence sticks the landing, there's more than enough in this novel to make up for the few issues I had with it, especially considering this is a debut! Cleopatra and Frankenstein, the luminous debut novel from Coco Mellors, is a book about many things: It's a great, swooning love story; a shattering depiction of how addiction and mental illness warp our lives; and a perceptive, witty portrait of globalized New York.

For readers of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends, an addictive, humorous, and poignant debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple's impulsive marriage. I have nothing kind to say because for me to have a discussion about this book Mellors would have had to do something as an author worth discussing. I sometimes loved, and sometimes hated all the characters in this one: the title pair who marry mere months after meeting, and their eccentric circle of pals. the characters themselves were selfish, self-pitying fools (derogatory) without one redeeming quality at all. Mellors also does not have the ability to make her insufferable characters compelling like Moshfegh.

So if a book can grip me where I'm reading the words and actually taking them in rather than having my eyes read the words while my brain thinks of that one time in year seven when a boy I liked said happy birthday to me and I awkwardly said happy birthday back. Yes, Mellors’ novel was an instant success, branded ‘hottest book of the year’ by Stylist and an instant Sunday Times Bestseller, which makes it hard to believe that this is in fact her first published novel.

Young people, people with addictions, people with traumatic childhood experiences, whatever it may be. they read like caricatures to me than actual characters, they go on poetic rants about their life and whatnot— and it reeks of white privilege. Mellors does not have the writing skill nor does she have the ability to capture certain aspects of life that Rooney can so naturally do. I'm more of a complicated, unconventional, dark, realistic, modern-day kind of romance; where there's turbulence and you're unsure of how it will end and if they should even end up together or not.I actually admire Mellors’ decision to make the central female character, Cleo, the less likeable female – it goes against the grain and subverts most stereotypes. deleted my old review because i was senselessly ranting, but i still do think this felt painfully self-indulgent, more so than the works of sally rooney – of which this book has been exhaustively compared to. Their caustic relationship, however, doesn't prove to be as picture perfect as it seems, as each struggles with addiction (whether sex, drugs or alcohol) and mental health issues. Later, as they lay naked in each other’s arms, the mosquito net breathing softly around them, Cleo turned to his profile”. If you can grip me that quickly, we're off to a good start, which is exactly what this book did (which is super rare for me!