My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

I was so sure I’d love this one, a twentysomething queer person (the book uses she/her pronouns for Sofie) who spent a lot of her life thinking she liked men but then it turned out she liked women… but unfortunately I found the narration to be a little contrived and in a lot of places the humour didn’t land. I know how tricky it is to translate humour, not only technically but also in the sense that every nation’s sense of humour will differ - well, every person’s does but British humour will likely land very differently to Dutch humour. 

The book is episodic and nonlinear, with Sofie leading the reader through little snapshots of her life. We witness her first (disappointing) sexual experience with a man, sit in on terrifying Russian lessons (some of the strongest portions in terms of humour actually), scratch our heads with Sofie as she tries to get to grips with lesbian dating, and mourn with her when her mother dies fairly young of cancer. The strongest sections for me were the Russian escapades and the poignant exploration of her mother’s decline and death. 

I believe this book is autofiction, but it reads much like an internet essay. It tries a little too hard to be zany, and I think it might have been better off as a collection of essays. 

Also a small thing that ended up bugging me - a phrase is used throughout the Dutch version (from what I gleaned from Dutch reviews) - ‘snap je’. Google translate gives ‘do you understand’. The translator Kristen Gehrman has gone for ‘you know?’ throughout the English. Sofie, the protagonist, uses ‘snap je’ like a vocal tic, but it must work more in Dutch, because the English ‘you know’ just did not fit naturally in a lot of the places it was used. Maybe Gehrman could have switched it up sometimes with ‘you get me?’ Or ‘you feel me?’ A tiny thing but I couldn’t unnotice it and it really began to bug me 👀

Overall a little bit disappointing given my high expectations, but not without its strong points and a fresh queer voice from the Netherlands.