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.

Permission is a beautifully crafted story of grief.

Echo, an actress in LA, loses her father. He drowns and his body is never found. Dealing with her own grief and that of her mother, she stays in her childhood home where she meets a neighbour, Orly, a dominatrix. Echo is fascinated by Orly's power and she finds comfort in her, in defining who she is, now that she is without her father,

I loved the writing style of the author, Saskia Vogel and the delicate way in which she described loss, grief, lust and love. The story gently touched on the subject of BDSM, without exploiting it for the plot. Permission was essentially a fantastic story about finding out who we are and what we want.

I'm so pleased to have had the experience of reading this book which I found to be truly unique. Highly recommended and a fully deserved five stars!

I received a complimentary digital copy of this novel, at my own request, from Little, Brown Group UK via NetGalley. This review is my own unbiased opinion.

Echo is an aspiring actress and sometimes nude model at her local art centre. In truth, her acting career has stalled after a promising start. It seems she doesn’t show enough teeth when she smiles (only eight versus her lookalike rival’s dozen). She lives in a house on the coast outside Los Angeles, her parents having migrated to America from the Netherlands. Her mother and father seemed to have lived a turbulent marriage until, one day, her father dies. He’d sometimes climbed on the coastal cliffs and even shared this pastime with Echo, teaching her the routes and the holds, but one day he falls. His body is swallowed by the sea and Echo and her mother struggle to accept his disappearance from their lives.

Relationships don’t come easy to Echo, she visits a local musician for sex but other than sharing their bodies very little communication takes place. But then she meets a neighbour, Orla , and things change. Orla, it turns out, is a dominatrix by inclination and by profession. She shares her house with Piggy who is her lodger and her ‘slave’. Is it possible that Echo has found someone who can cure her of her rather awkward and unhappy existence?

Orla, Piggy and Echo strike up an uneasy alliance as Echo is introduced to BDSM culture. There’s a certain amount of detail provided describing the activities they participate in that might make some readers uncomfortable, but I believe this to be merely a somewhat titillating sideshow to the real story of the developing relationship between the two women. And as Echo continues to wrestle with the competing needs of developing some kind of life for herself whilst keeping an eye on her needy mother it’s not clear where events will eventually take her.

This is a book I never really settled to. I didn’t find Echo to be a particularly sympathetic lead character and I also failed to fully engage with the other players here. However, it does feel well written, in parts, and the structure of the piece and the vagueness of the prose did keep me off-guard, which felt in keeping with the somewhat unconventional narrative. It’s a book that made me think and it did introduce me to a culture that was previously alien to me, but it wasn’t a story I was impatient to return to.

An interesting story about a young woman dealing with the grief and unjustified guilt of losing her father who finds some much-needed solace and support in the BDSM community. It's quite an unusual premise that immediately drew my attention to the book, however, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the story as a whole.

The novel mainly focuses on Echo, a young woman who returns to her childhood home to mourn the loss of her father. She has a strained relationship with her mother and, while searching for refuge from her grief and the complicated relationship with her mother, she becomes infatuated with a new neighbour, a woman named Orly who turns out to be a dominatrix and lives with her roommate that she refers to as Piggy.

It just so happened that, shortly after finishing this book, I went on to read Ottessa Moshegh's latest novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, in which a young woman is also trying to process her grief in a rather unusual way, so, inevitably, I ended up comparing these two novels. Both of them are mainly character studies and, while I think that Vogel succeeded at creating intriguing characters, in my opinion, the characterization in Permission paled by comparison to the unique and memorable narrative voice in My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

I wish that this book had been longer so that it could explore in more depth the fascinating relationship dynamics between these characters and also give some more insight into the backstories of some of the characters, particularly, Orly, who remained an enigma throughout the book.

Permissions is a beautifully crafted story of grief. The delicate sentences of loss, grief, lust and love carried me through the hard to define plot. Echo, an actress in LA losses her father. He drowns and his body is never found. Dealing with her and her mother grief she stays in her childhood home. There she meets a neighbour, Orly, a dominatrix. Echo is instantly drawn into Orly's power, the mystery of her and the dominance and assurance she brings with her. She finds comfort in her, in defining who she is without her father, but with Orly to submit to.

The story gently touches on the subject of BDSM, never exploiting it for the plot. It is masterfully woven into the story of grief and love. Essentially story of finding who we are and what we want.

The experience of reading this book is truly unique, it takes you on the bizarre ride throughout California, and people with desires that many of the readers will find unusual and hard to understand. But it is all beautifully woven to the story that lulls you into calmness. Sadly, but also oddly pleasantly, I didn't get closure with this book. For days after finishing it, I was catching myself thinking about the characters and what will happen when I return to the story, only to realise there's no story to return to... I read it all...

Orly and Piggy are really interesting characters, and all the BDSM stuff and sex scenes are engaging and dealt with sensitively, but I never believed in Echo as the MC. She just didn't have any personality or desire whatsoever, so I struggled to engage her story emotionally. I loved the descriptions of LA and the coastline though.

Saskia Vogel's Permission is an interesting debut about grief and BDSM. Not two topics you'd expect to find side by side in a novel, but it (mostly) works.

Echo, an actor without much work, returns to her hometown of LA after her father disappears in a freak accident. She stays with her mum, with whom she has a fractious relationship, and works as a model for life drawing classes. It is while she is back home that she meets a young woman who has just moved in down the street. This woman is Orly, a dominatrix, who works from home. Echo spends more and more time with Orly, getting embroiled in her life and that of her roommate, Piggy.

Permission is mostly a character study, and it is this aspect where the novel succeeds. I would have liked to learn a little more about Orly's backstory, but her relationship with Echo was beautifully written. I did feel that the story lost its way a bit towards the end which is why I knocked off half a star from my rating.

"Only after I met Orly and understood that loving in the way you love is not enough, that you have to pay attention to how people need and want to be loved."

Written in a modernist style, this is a study in grief and healing. The narrator loses her father, has a troubled relationship with her mother, but comes to understand how to be loved in a positive way. It's quite an elusive narrative, elliptical rather than clear - there's some lovely writing but I'm not sure I always understood what it was saying. Tantalising and complex.