"I don’t do drugs I am drugs”

Anyone who has ever been in an all-consuming relationship will respond viscerally to this powerful novella. The book centres around our nameless narrator, a new girl in a big city, and her attraction to Finn - an older woman who knows who she is, and absolutely has her shit together. Our narrator quickly gets lost in an obsessive need to have Finn’s approval, and an intense unequal relationship develops then implodes. Caldwell’s writing pulls you in, and this is an intensely intimate examination of a woman trying to come to terms with her sexuality and identity; what it means to be a woman, a daughter, a friend.

This novella is incredibly well-written. Every sentence is put together beautifully. It’s a masterclass in how to write evocatively, almost poetically, while still producing prose that is eminently readable and that flows effortlessly.

The unnamed narrator of this story is refreshingly mixed up and chaotic. She doesn’t know what she wants, or what makes her happy, and she makes mistakes. She’s confused about her feelings for Finn, confused about what she wants, and she makes the wrong choices.

Finn is an enigma – we never really get to know her, but then neither does the narrator. And that adds a real authenticity to the narrative.

That said, I did find the characters a little self-absorbed at times, the narrator in particular. There were times when I wanted to scream ‘grow up!’ but that reaction certainly means the character got to me!

Perhaps the current situation in the world has made me suffer fools less gladly, and perhaps I may have been more tolerant of the narrator’s issues a few months ago – but I did feel at times as though I wanted to give her a kick up the backside! It’s hard to really love a story when you don’t particularly like the main protagonist.

That said, this takes nothing away from the writing itself – which really is beautiful.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to read and review this book.

After losing and replacing my broken Kindle and getting a new phone I was unable to download the title again for review as it was no longer available on Netgalley.

I’m really sorry about this and hope that it won’t affect you allowing me to read and review your titles in the future.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
Natalie.

I don't know why but I had it in my head that this was poetry, it definitely isn't it's prose. The story of a young, naive woman who leaves her cosy house by the woods to live in the big city. She falls head over heels, passionately, obsessively in love with an older woman called Finn. Finn is in a long term relationship so we all know how it's going to end.

I did DNF this book at 54%. I stayed for the love and jumped before the inevitable heartbreak. I can see this appealing to people but I'm afraid it wasn't for me. Contains alcohol and drug abuse. Relationship abuse.

An interesting, feminist read which I really enjoyed. The story was a bit too egotistic for me but was interesting nonetheless and good messages for girls and woman alike.

Women tells the story of a young straight girl who falls for an older lesbian girl. The relationship soon becomes rather obsessive and leads the main character to make some bad decisions.
Overall a good short read.

An enjoyable short read. In general I loved the way it was written, but feel that what the author held back, made me lose interest quite quickly...

I adored this. I read it in a single sitting and rarely went more than a few pages without highlighting massive chunks of it. Readers interested in books about female desire, people who like angry women and/or unsympathetic heroines, and, I suspect, fans of Sally Rooney’s novels, will all enjoy this.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading this book but was soon gripped by the story. A brilliantly written tale exploring sexual confusion, female friendship and what it means to be a woman.

This short book is as New York/Brooklyn/achingly hipster as the lead quote from Lena Dunham suggests. Now that we’ve established this, it’s still worth a read. Like most interesting stories, this one doesn’t depict a very healthy relationship. Had I read this in my early 20s, I would have lapped it all up with glee. Instead, I read this in my late 30s with my hands over my eyes, like listening to your much younger friend recount the car crash of mixed messages and a lack of boundaries young love creates. Ah, young love. Yes, I’m probably too jaded for this book, but let’s be clear: Finn sounds like a right wanker. A sexy wanker, but a wanker none the less – which makes this all very believable. An easy, fun and only slightly infuriating/eye-roll worthy read.

Well, I'm not quite sure how to rate this book. For one, there didn't seem to be a plot, just a plain narrative about a young women experimenting/discovering her sexuality. She gets involved with an older lesbian and the two of them have a tempestuous relationship that sounded rather toxic to me. The protagonist's voice is whiny and self-indulgent, but perhaps that is intentional, and I'm not really certain what happened (or why she was telling her story). The writing was also rather flat. Perhaps I'm the wrong target audience for this book.
(Review copy from NetGalley)

Although physically a slight book, this is a substantial piece of writing. It traces the trajectory of the narrator’s relationship with another woman, but, beyond that, it seems to me it’s about making sense of one’s psyche. The narrator is searingly honest yet ultimately remains enigmatic, to the reader but also to herself, and that sets this novella apart. It’s easy but not comfortable to read. It’s messy and uneven, but extraordinarily recognisable and real, and reflects what’s beautiful alongside what’s abject. Women is something different and unusual, and I’m very glad I came across it.

In spite of this book’s uninspiring cover and its less-than-helpful blurb, I decided to give it a chance. After all, it was being re-released by a reputable publisher of literary fiction, who seemed to be taking a chance on something a little more innovative than their big-name authors. Although the author teaches ‘creative nonfiction writing,’ this novella is pure fiction, albeit told in the first person and in a memoir style with plenty of references to well-known queer literature and media. So it ought to have been just the book I was looking for.

Unfortunately, this is not the book I was looking for. The narrator is too self-involved for my liking, and while I have no problem with unlikable characters in general (some of them can be a lot of fun), there needs to be an authorial awareness of their protagonist’s flaws, something I really don’t get a sense of in this narration. The narrator moves from her mother’s rural home in a not easily identifiable part of the US to an unnamed city, still in the US, we assume. There she meets, and soon falls in love with, a much older butch woman, Finn. While fiction needs more butches in all varieties, the narrator is far too obsessed with her own feelings to investigate her lover’s personality and motivations in any great detail.

I dislike the romance trope of two characters who are so in lust with each other that they can’t put a brake on their desires and think of how their actions will affect other people’s feelings, Finn is in a long-term relationship when she embarks on the grand affair, yet her partner’s situation is never explored even in the abstract. Likewise, when the narrator tries to connect with other women through dating apps in an effort to distance herself from Finn, we never get a feel for how they feel about her general selfishness and flakiness. Admittedly, the narrator is young, but she also claims to have packed a lot of travel and addictions into her pre-Finn life and hasn’t been totally unaware of lesbian relationships prior to falling in love with a woman. Much is made of her mother’s closest neighbours being a middle-aged lesbian couple.

While I appreciated the references to lesbians in popular and queer culture, I didn’t feel that any of them helped to give the narrator any kind of clue to how she fitted into either the queer or the mainstream world, if indeed she did. I’m sad that this book wasn’t anything I wanted it to be, but I suspect it may have appeal to a younger, more US-centric audience.

A short novella about a young woman who works in a library and her relationships.

Have you ever read a book that you absolutely loved but you don't think that many other people will get it? That's exactly how I feel about Women. This short, stripped down story of a relationship just...spoke to me. It's honest and raw and funny and sad and managed to give me all of the feels. It felt like I had stolen someone's diary and was illicitly gobbling up the details of their life - a bit like when you come across someone who over shares everything on social media and you fall down a rabbit hole stalking learning everything about them.
I don't usually like books that are either self published or haven't had a lot of money spent on them because you can just feel the cheap - the oddly worded sentences, the rubbish cover page and the super obvious title (not to mention the typographical errors and misprints). I don't know what it is exactly, but Women somehow feels like it fits into this category. Despite scoring a cover quote from Lena Dunham (I personally have nothing against her, but if you do then don't let it put you off) it's obviously not going to be a bestseller and it definitely has an air of "debut author/limited budget" about it. However, that all seems to form part of it's charm and actually enhances the appeal of the book rather than detracting from it.

I think it's the quality of the writing. Chloe Caldwell writes with the most unflinching honesty and has elevated the tale of a fairly short lived, obviously doomed relationship from one of navel-gazing self pity to raw exploration of human emotion. I loved that all of her characters were so flawed and that they acted in completely illogical ways because it made them real. I loved the detail, I loved the depth, I loved the characterisation. I even loved the sex scenes because again, they felt so honest. I don't think I've ever read a book where the sex is detailed but not titillating, relatable but not comedic, orgasmic but not euphemistic. It's so rare to see a character with unshaven legs and half her clothes still on having incredible sex and it's this unashamed female gaze/queer perspective that makes this book stand apart.

Overall, I loved this novella so, so much that in pretty much devoured it all in one go. Like watching a car crash in slow motion, I just couldn't tear myself away. I can't wait to see what Chloe Caldwell comes up with next.

One word review: Hedonistic

Rambling review: I adored this little novella.

I loved that it was a romantic fantasy  I loved that it perfectly captured describing a lover to a friend, knowing they won’t fully approve of your choices desperately wanting them to feel your whirlwind, withholding facts of the story so they don’t rain on your parade. I loved that it was a cliché (the Orlando tattoo – need I say more?). I love how of its time it felt, initiating contact through a Facebook wall (side note: this invoked some very cringy memories from my university days, pre-private messaging). I loved how she broke the fourth wall, talking about how the reader should “experience the book” and how certain descriptive tropes should be “banned in all forms”.

I love that she didn’t use the trope of kissing at midnight on New Year’s Eve.  I love that she doesn’t shy away from graphic sex scenes. I love how she implies that discovering you are gay can surprise anyone, even a perceived liberal creative. I love how many relatable moments there were. That fear of makeup rubbing off on clothing when you go in for a hug – yes! That fear is real! I did this on my first date with my now-boyfriend! I was mortified (especially given I so rarely wear makeup). Also, what bra clasp do I use?! Again, the now-boyfriend put me on the spot here and I had the exact same reaction as her.

It’s them against the world, and she demonstrates exactly how problematic that insular mind-set is; I physically flinched when I read “Who meets a stutterer?”.  It is also impossible to ignore how immature she is, deeply concerned with the mechanics of lesbian sex and lacking in emotional maturity (throwing the phone whilst on a call, to make sure Finn hears the smash).

Chloe Caldwell is usually a nonfiction writer, so I would be interested to hear how much was autobiographical. I know that we aren’t meant to ask that of women’s fiction, as it implies a diminished capacity for creativity in the minds of women, but given how she address the reader and how she is a nonfiction writer, I think this is a very fair question. Chloe indirectly addressed this herself with the line: “As soon as you write something down it’s fiction”.

There are lots of parallels to Pages For You, so I whilst it is different in terms of style and content, I would certainly recommend it to PFY fans.

P.S. “writing this book”, “editing this manuscript”… Surely it is nonfiction?!

Star rating: Four and a half

Year published: 2018

Publishing house: Fourth Estate

Amazon Summary: A young woman moves from the countryside to the city. Inexplicably, inexorably and immediately, she falls in love with another woman for the first time in her life. Finn is nineteen years older than her, wears men’s clothes, has a cocky smirk of a smile – and a long-term girlfriend. With precision, wit and tenderness, Women charts the frenzy and the fall out of love.

I was rather disappointed by this book - I'm not sure what I expected, but I thought it may feel like a powerful book about a woman realising her own strengths. However, it came across as egotistical and wallowing. I don't feel that I gained anything from reading it, which was shame as there were a few beautifully written lines.

In Women, Chloe Caldwell's debut novel, our unnamed narrator embarks on her first same-sex relationship after moving to a new city and meeting soft butch Finn, who is nineteen years older than her. I requested this on NetGalley after reading Elle's excellent review , where she suggests that this is a kind of 'tourist-lesbian novel' that doesn't deal adequately with the power structures that marginalise lesbians and bisexual women. In general, I completely agree; unlike Conversations with Friends, Women is happy to engage on a surface level with queer culture, the haircuts and clothing and token trans friends, the lesbian writing and films and TV shows, but rarely properly asks questions about identity, even as our narrator struggles with whether or not she should identify as a lesbian. This misses much of why lesbians are oppressed by heteronormative society, and how the trappings of queerness are not its substance.

To an extent, I sympathise with Caldwell's task: lesbians remain so under-represented, especially in fiction, that any novel that centres on a same-sex relationship between women ends up carrying an unfair burden. The novel is also already four years old; it was first published in the US in 2014. And yet I was still disappointed to see familiar stereotypes about tempestuous, doomed lesbian relationships being repeated, and Caldwell's stab at making this ironic falls flat: 'I ask Finn if things are always this insane and dramatic between two women, and she says yes.' It felt especially gratuitous to have our narrator come home near the end of the novel to find that even the older lesbian couple she grew up nearby have broken up.

However, I do disagree with one frequent criticism of the novel; that our narrator's relationship with Finn is exploitative because she is trying on a lesbian identity for size. Both women, it seemed to me, were exploiting each other. Finn is older, savvier, and has a long-term girlfriend, while the narrator has the ability to retreat back into a safer straight identity if she wants to, though I didn't feel that the narrator was always planning her escape; her questioning of her sexuality, such as it is, feels genuine. Nevertheless, this doesn't address the broader issues with this slight novel, which is important because it exists but doesn't do a great deal even within its tiny page count. Three and a half stars.

Women is an amazing little novella, a real gut-busting tear-jerker.

I devoured the book in one sitting and felt disappointed it’s not several hundred pages longer. I could have stayed with the narrator and Finn forever and never grown bored.

As a lesbian, Women is very easy to relate to. The narrator’s intense love for Finn and their screwed-up dynamics of their affair echo my own experiences. They probably echo a lot of experiences. At times, I felt like the author was telling my story and I got the chills.

Women is not just about someone’s first lesbian experience, it’s about the intensity of first love, something that is universal. For many people, anyway. I remember the first time I truly loved someone, a woman, thirteen years ago. I haven’t seen or spoken to her since but she is always in my heart. First love is particular kind of love, a haunting love.

Women is amazing. I loved every word.