The Pisces

The Pisces
von Melissa Broder

Bewertet mit 3 Sternen

Lucy is almost forty and somehow stuck in her life: she has been working on her thesis on Sappho for years now, but has lost track and doesn’t advance anymore. The same is true for her relationship with Jamie who cannot decide between moving together and founding a family and needing more space for himself. When the university threatens Lucy with throwing her out and when Jamie refuses to make a decision, they dramatically break up and Lucy flees to her sister Annika’s house in Venice Beach. Since Annika will be away for work for a couple of weeks, Lucy agrees to baby-sit her dog and stay there for a while. With the help of a love addiction therapy group and Tinder, Lucy tries to solve her problems and to figure out what she really wants in life. When she meets a cute swimmer on the beach one evening, this might be the sign she has been waiting for.

The novel sounded quite enthralling to me since I thought that it would be easy to relate to the protagonist: being at a turning point in life, questioning her job and relationship, added to this an intellectual female character who might have an interesting approach to the whole love stuff. Moreover, “love addition therapy group” promised to be great fun to read since it sounds quite absurd.

To sum up the novel, I am a bit disappointed which might be my own fault since I did not pay too close attention to the fact that the novel is rated as “Women’s fiction”. Thus, the protagonist wasn’t the intellectual character I had hoped for, but quite some dumb and brainless being who was only searching for men to spend her nights with and who devoted her days to browsing shops for clothes (which she bought for an incredible amount of money) and thinking about her make-up and waxing. Lucy is incredibly shallow which annoyed me a lot wasn’t in tune with the intellectual researcher we got to know in the beginning. Apart from this, there were by far too many explicit scenes over too long paragraphs. Some readers might like it, it’s just not my favourite type of novel, but as said before, I didn’t pay close attention to the genre.

After the first half of the novel – which had some quite funny incidents and absurd dialogues that I really enjoyed – Lucy meets the swimmer. First of all, I thought that I had misunderstood something. Then I was waiting for the moment Lucy wakes up and realizes that she had quite some strange dream. Yet, this moment never came, the author simply implemented some utterly bizarre prop which didn’t work for me at all.

I can understand why some readers truly enjoy to read the book, it just wasn’t one for me. Too strange and weird in the plot, the protagonist not really authentic and too many explicit passages.