This two stars feels harsh but—I blame Kierkegaard.

I’ve been dipping my toe into uncomfy general fiction and enjoying it. This book centered queer relationships and the Palestinian diaspora and I was ready. One thing about it was perfect: how mind bogglingly unlikeable this FMC was. Like, trigger warning for cheating, holy crap. I loved it.

But it did two things I hated. And they both involve the book’s opening Kierkegaard quote:
“Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.”

For one, this was my first clue that the story wasn’t going to tackle its messy subject matter in the style I personally prefer. Because the messier the topic, the more I want to draw my own conclusions about it and the less I enjoy a book telling me how to feel. So a book about a woman who is constantly seduced by the ‘possibility’ of other relationships opening with a Kierkegaard quote? I was rolling my eyes on page one. And the thematic hand-holding, plus reductive characters, only got more pronounced from there, imo.

And two (sorry for any philosophical pedantry), this book positioned itself as an implicit critique of Kierkegaard (our heroine’s journey overturning the original Kierkegaard possibility > pleasure quote). But it wasn’t. We started and ended this book within a Kierkegaardian ontology, never moving beyond self-focused moralistic handwringing, going nowhere. And like, Kierkegaard is fine (in a chapeau-ed dog, room on fire kind of way 😆). But the quote on page one was too much of a neon sign pointing to where we were supposed go for… us not to end up there.

But I’m being annoying. The link between pleasure and possibility (becoming necessity) in a Hegelian critique of the German Romantics and proto-existentialists like Kierkegaard is one of my favourite topics. So this bugaboo was very much a me-thing.