Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Review: The Pisces by Melissa Broder

Release date: May 1st 2018
Publisher: Hogarth
Purchase: Amazon


Synopsis via Goodreads:

An original, imaginative, and hilarious debut novel about love, anxiety, and sea creatures, from the author of So Sad Today.

Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for thirteen years when she and her boyfriend break up in a dramatic flameout. After she bottoms out in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Annika's home is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety -- not in the Greek chorus of women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound's easy affection. 

Everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night. But when Lucy learns the truth about his identity, their relationship--and Lucy's understanding of what love should look like--take a very unexpected turn. A masterful blend of vivid realism and giddy fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, THE PISCES is a story about falling in obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have.

*Publisher approved request via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.



This was...different, and while as a Pisces myself I could relate to some characteristics depicted, other forms of behavior were obviously individual and just had me utterly baffled. 

I definitely see how Lucy had mental issues with her thought process and inappropriate actions. She was looking for something that not even she knew what that was, and for a moment there she truly believed she'd found it with a mythical creature. That part of the story was the craziest and the things they did during intimacy had me cringing. Plus the way it ended had me a little confused, in the sense that certain things weren't clearly explained and I needed to understand more about Theo. 

Also, I hated how Lucy treated Dominic. I honestly felt disgusted with her and would have liked for her to face some kind of retribution. But oh well, the story wasn't about that, I guess, and at least she was showing signs of growth towards the end.

Overall, this was a tough one for me to get through and I'm still iffy about my feelings toward the story. All I can say is that it was just really different, crazy, but all in all great writing.



About the Author
melissa broderMelissa Broder is the author of four poetry collections, including LAST SEXT (Tin House, 2016), and the essay collection SO SAD TODAY (Grand Central, 2016). THE PISCES is her first novel.
Broder writes the So Sad Today column for VICE, the horoscopes for Lenny Letter, and the Beauty and Death column at Elle.com. Her poems appear in POETRY, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Guernica, Fence, The Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, et al. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry.
Broder received her BA from Tufts University and her MFA from City College of New York. She lives in Los Angeles.





1 comment:

  1. I am not sure if I would be able to get over the way she treats Dominic even if it is not the main point of the book. I really don't like it when people aren't at least decent to each other... Hmm. I don't think this one is for me :/

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