Acts of Service: "A sex masterpiece" (Guardian)

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What is truly masculine or feminine when the doors are closed against the world’s expectations, when our clothes are off and we’re reaching for creative ways to share intimacy, to exchange secrets about ourselves that don’t fit the provided lexicon?

on some level i am partly to blame for this negative review (i have read one too many novels about young women involving themselves in relationships with older men and i know they annoy me more often than not) but this one is uniquely bad. it's marketed as a "queer" novel, and eve IS bisexual (though she seems to identify as a lesbian at the beginning and a lot of the rest of the novel is her trying to self-justify her attraction to a man and talking about how awful it is and how ashamed she feels, which is bizarre considering that very few people are ever shamed for being heterosexual and pretty much all gay people have been judged for it at some point).A provocative debut of sex and sexuality as a twentysomething New Yorker pursues a sexual freedom that follows no other lines than her own desire. I was even tempted to add 'straight' in there, too, because most of the sex scenes are between a man and a woman but, Eve is not straight so that would be dishonest. I work hard to love men, though a large percentage make me feel - and in fact, be - unsafe in this world.

A rich as hell white cis straight man who doesn't believe in safe words and is so sure he can read women during sex he thinks it's funny when women express how uncomfortable they feel around him being both the problem and somehow the answer made no sense to me. instead, i found myself highlighting swaths of text, almost buzzing with that oh my god is this is a five star this might be a five star feeling, resonating with the emotions depicted and stunned by how lovely and clear the writing was.

a lot of time talking myself out of the things I liked so that I could be a different, better kind of person. me was Eve's relationship with her father and money, the way she has sought out this purposely aimless independence because of her upper-class upbringing. ED NOTE: The author made it clear that the extended fart noise was the only bit reflective of her 'intentions' for the book, meaning to read this book at higher level intellectual or queer conversation, or to expect narrative intention from it is actually to read against its text. honor her by having a threesome for the story, falling in love with a GIRL for REAL, and asking her if she wants to run away to MEXICO.

Acts of Service ] arrives with quiet confidence and a fully formed bank of ideas about intimacy, sexual ethics and contemporary mores that Fishman could go on exploring for years to come. It's supposed to be a threesome including another woman, but the women are really only walk-on characters. Above all, the author seems to forget that hungry bodies don’t all have the same attitude to desire, and neither do traumatized ones, or impoverished ones, or fat ones, or disabled ones, or queer ones. Her writing is so brilliant and acute that multiple times, at random points in the book, I found myself wondering if she was in my head.As we chatted over a few months I found I liked the generosity of Romi’s messages—­even when I failed spectacularly, she never teased me—­and she endeared herself to me with the general bent of her knowledge, which was always embarrassing in areas of art or pop culture but acute with regard to politics, history, and the crucial art of synonyms. Seamlessly written, sedate and subtle and so pleasurable, and quite enrapturing on a psychological level. A young barista adrift in Brooklyn, Eve is concerned by the various evils of modern life – capitalism, sexism, environmental degradation – but remains unsure what, if anything, she can do about them. But Fishman isn’t really interested in looking at the world in this way: her story seems to be aiming at allegory, but ends up in an uncomfortable halfway house between that and realism, in the end achieving neither . genuinely cannot comprehend how a queer women seems to think women's attraction to other women is somehow less real than men's attraction to women.