October 1, 2018
In this thoughtful and fascinating debut from Feltman, two students in Columbia’s MFA program in 2016 spiral into a romance—and just as quickly spiral out. When Hesper strikes up a conversation with Willa in a diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, their attraction is undeniable; Hesper is enchanting and adventurous, and Willa is endearingly attentive. The two begin to tentatively navigate the unfamiliar territory of dating women (the first such experience for both of them), narrating alternating chapters. But Willa’s intensity soon gets under Hesper’s skin; she seems to love Hesper too much, and Hesper can’t shake the certainty she will push Willa away. Both reeling from a break-up conversation that the reader never fully sees, Willa and Hesper fly from their pain: Hesper travels to Tbilisi, Georgia, on a quest to learn about her grandfather’s past; Willa’s roommate signs her up for an “Inspiring Jewish Survivor Trip!” to Germany and, to her own surprise, Willa goes. Feltman slices directly to the core of heartbreak’s ugliest moments: the temptation to fall back into patterns, to keep running from intimacy and risks. She evocatively captures the tension between aching to move on and not give up, and how the shattering of one relationship fractures others. Feltman stays away from happy ending conventions and skillfully weaves glimmers of hope and healing throughout, making for a keenly perceptive novel.
December 1, 2018
Feltman's debut follows two MFA students who fall in love, break up, and learn how to heal on their own.Emotional and intuitive, Willa is the kind of person who makes "everything [hurt] a little bit extra." When she sees Hesper, another writer in Columbia's MFA program, at a late-night diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she is instantly attracted -- but unsure how to negotiate Hesper's enigmatic style of flirtation. "I thought: she has to be gay," Willa muses. "She has to at least be in the vicinity of gayness." Their short-lived relationship is filled with ups and downs, as Willa struggles with the weight of sexual assault and Hesper contends with her own queerness and fears of intimacy. "I ruin people," Hesper tells her father late in the novel. "And I don't want to be close to people anymore. I don't want to have to look at them after they're broken." In order to heal from the breakup, Willa signs up for a tour of German concentration camps, and Hesper travels with her family to Tbilisi to uncover her grandfather's roots. The novel ends in the shadow of the 2016 election and the Trump presidency, when its characters must confront questions of trauma and belonging with a new sense of urgency. Writing in alternating first-person chapters, Feltman renders each perspective with moving fidelity to her characters and their interior lives. When Willa worries that "loving me had an expiration date" or Hesper feels "radioactive with depression," there's not a whiff of ironic distance or judgment. It's an impressive feat for any novelist working in the shadow of TV shows like HBO's Girls or novels like Emily Gould's Friendship, which attracted outsized criticism for their depictions of "unlikable" young women coming up in the city. The result is a deep and intimate portrait of two queer women in their mid-20s who come of age in New York while navigating--or refusing to navigate--their relationships to privilege, family, identity, and faith. What could be a novel about an intense attraction that falls apart is, in Feltman's hands, a bigger story about how people change us--and how we welcome or resist that change.A moving glimpse into 21st-century queer womanhood.
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November 1, 2018
The heroines of this gentle and sweeping love story, Willa and Hesper, are MFA candidates in a fiction-writing program at Columbia. Willa is an only child from a New Jersey suburb immediately outside New York City, and Hesper is the dramatic youngest child of her Marin County-based family. Willa and Hesper's relationship begins during an extremely sensitive time, immediately after Willa is sexually assaulted outside her Jewish temple in the suburbs. Their union is fast and intense, lasting only seven months but leaving both women irrevocably changed. In the wake of their partnership, Willa travels to Europe to tour concentration camps and connect with the trauma of her ancestors. Hesper goes with her family to the Republic of Georgia to get closer to their own elderly relatives. From Willa and Hesper, readers may see how relationships between twentysomethings, even when brief, have the potential to inspire unimaginable self-discovery. Set immediately before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Feltman's novel is as titillating and tense as the experience of young adult love itself.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)