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

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In this novel, the 'dinner party' is a threesome, between Eve—a New York City barista with a 'perfect body'—and a soigné couple, Olivia and Nathan.

she talks about how there will be something missing in her life if she doesn't have sexual experiences with men because who else would appreciate her body and her femininity in the same way (which is both sexist and deeply transphobic). She didn’t love me for my body, though once we were intimate she claimed to recognize a special beauty in it.Standing there, naked and hunched over my little screen, I felt overwhelmed with the urge to show someone this new iteration of my body.

There are all these things I can point to that make the power dynamic suspect, so many things about the ways he did things that were not coercive and yet they weren't entirely not.

Eve, the narrator of Lillian Fishman's Acts of Service, keeps an Eve Babitz quote taped to her wall that she and her roommate reference constantly: 'Any time I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life'.

The only part that thrilled me was repeatedly refreshing the page to see the photos reconstitute themselves again and again, not in a private folder on my phone but in a shared white room accessible from all corners of the world. The shots themselves were fairly standard: my faceless body floating in bedrooms and bathrooms, in mirrors.The book of Acts of Service is great fiction where at fifteen, Eve, fell in love with a girl in her own town in Massachusetts. eve is drawn in by olivia’s prickliness and deceptively demure exterior; the sex is competitive and distant between them, whereas it is easy with the entitled boyfriend, nathan, precisely because of the entitlement. All the characters here have a similar status, it is almost necessary because if they had anything real to worry about, they wouldn't have the time and the space to do everything they do.

Eve isn't a very likeable character and prone to rambling navel-gazing at great,and tedious, length while Nathan is a bit of a Poundland psychologist and Olivia flits around in the shadows like an afterthought. I would just like to say straight away that I will read anything else that Lillian publishes in the future. One night when I was feeling exceptionally beautiful and isolated I decided to start sharing the nudes online. to all authors out there, stop the omission of speech marks in your work in favour for what you think is quirkiness.Fishman's alluring if punctilious debut poses questions about sex, sexuality, and power via the story of a young woman's exploration of desire. i dont usually read books that are so focused on sexuality but I had heard good things about this one.