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

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But while there were glimmers of insight and memorable lines, those didn’t feel worth reading a whole novel about two women idolizing this insufferable guy. Majority of the text is thoughts that the main character has, rather than action, so if you don’t like that, this is not the book for you.

eve is extremely self aware and darkly critical, which allows for a plethora of passages of baroque self reflection. It feels like this is a novel that has something to say about sex and gender and queerness, but I could not tell you what it is. Fishman’s prose is polished but it can also be stagey and the concepts she’s exploring seem more than a little confused and confusing. in acts of service, all relationships are nuanced as she is able to pull apart and differentiate love, sexual desire, and romance, which often are all grouped into one sentiment. Acts of Service doesn’t kiss you first; it gets right to it—depicting the liquid frequencies of need and power with a thoughtful, savage eye.She's contacted by loads of men,, who she ignores,and Olivia, a woman who intrigues her and they arrange to meet.

What Fishman does tackle is a range of issues that our cultural mythology doesn't really acknowledge: that loving/romantic relationships aren't necessarily enough to turn off sexual feelings for other people; that sexuality labels might limit bodily acts and that sexual desire may move beyond identities; that questions of submission and consent are more complicated than sexual politics might sometimes infer; that the politics of the gaze still play out - and, perhaps most uncomfortably, that decades of feminist theorising may not have countered (some) women's need for male visual and erotic approval. the author is queer, the lived experience of queerness is convincing, and drawing more contrasting material from that well might have steered the course away from that fucking clown show of a denouement, if only because it’d mean there were more things to react to in the world. The primary fantasy that followed me everywhere was a vision in which I was naked, lined up in a row of twenty girls, a hundred girls, as many naked girls as would fit inside the room I was in—­the café, the lobby of Romi’s building, the subway car.Eve tries to be grateful that Romi doesn’t love her for her body – she knows that to be appreciated for her looks is to be objectified, and she knows that she should not enjoy objectification – but, in fact, she is disappointed.