With Laure Becdelièvre's debut novel, I clearly had nothing in common with Mathilde, the main character. However, the prose grabbed me from the first page. It's lyrical, not overwritten but beautifully evocative. In the book's 336 pages, I didn't notice a lot of repetitions, which I admired since the narrative is very much closed on itself. The book opens with Mathilde discovering she's pregnant, and follows the minute sensations of her body through the nine following months as she keeps her work as a nude model in an art school. Every page is about her, her thoughts and feelings and sensations. At some point I felt almost claustrophobic for lack of air and perspective, but as I said earlier, the writing was easy to get lost into. Despite the book's size, it was very quick to read, but since so little happens, I feel like it could have been even a little shorter and still make its point.

One thing that did take me out of the story was the references to real-life events, here the terrorist attacks in France in november 2015 and the subsequent ones in neighbouring countries. To me, this is much too recent to read about, and I don't think it brought anything to the story; it only served as a sound box of all the comments that were made at the time.

A positive point was the representation, beyond the heteronormative couple at the centre: there's a fat, Muslim, fabulous secondary character and another character that I can't give much info about without spoiling too much. However, I read them from my white woman's point of view, so I'm clearly not the best at judging whether it was done with sensitivity.