I'm A Fan - Sheena Patel

Fiction

Rating: 8/10

In the last few years, I have seen an influx of books that are willing to tell stories that are brave enough to forgo niceties, cast unlikable characters, and mine the depths of messy and disturbing lives. This is one such book.

Our narrator is an unnamed woman in thrall to a toxic older lover and obsessed with the other woman snatching his attention away. So much so that she has turned herself into a stalker, poring over and frantically refreshing the woman’s Instagram feeds, and even following her when she leaves her house. The narrative itself is vitriolic, tortuous, fractured and a perfect fit for the story it sets out to tell.

Our narrator starts off thinking she is up for this affair; he is cheating on his wife and she on her boyfriend, so they have a sort of equilibrium in their entanglements. But with every passing page she becomes plagued by the fact that he has a whole other storyline unfolding and she is merely a subplot, a brief aside.

While the author offers up plenty of social critique and insight, she brilliantly balances it with relationship drama and cutting humour. The chapter titles alone are the work of a genius.

Maybe not to everyone’s taste, but a welcome change of pace from the books that usually fill up summer reading lists.

My thanks to NetGalley, Penguin Random House Canada and the author for the advance readers copy.

Book Pairing(s): Confessions by Kanae Minto, Assembly by Natasha Brown, Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley