I think this book is the closest thing I’ve read to erotica, a once-banned portion of a French classic that has been re-released as a novella. When Violette LeDuc tried to publish this piece as part of her novel Ravages in 1954, her publisher Gallimard told her the 150 pages could not be published because of the explicit depiction of homosexual desire between two 17-year-old girls at boarding school. The pages were censored and Ravages published without them, but now they’ve been brought to English-speaking readers as a novella.

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I did think that some crucial development was missing, possibly since it had been cleaved from the whole. Thérèse and Isabelle seem to prove there’s a fine line between love and hate, as the enemies-to-lovers trope unfurls faster than I’ve ever seen. Most of the book is centred on their physical relationship over a few days.

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In terms of prose, Sophie Lewis has done a fantastic job - there’s a lot of waves and bubbles and sweetness to be translated, leading to some lovely sentences like ‘‘I was waking to spring with the babbling of lilacs under my skin’. But I found the dialogue to be rather clunky, often it didn’t seem like they were even in the same conversation?

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Clumsy dialogue aside, it is an interesting piece of writing for historical context alone, and it’s also a great portrayal of the all-consuming desire of first, same-sex loves. It reminded me somewhat of Emma Donoghue’s Learned by Heart, as the girls are of a similar age and it captures that ‘this person is everything to me even though I’ve only known her a few days’ feeling.