Reviews with content warning for Homophobia - Mrs. S

Reviews tagging 'Homophobia'

Mrs. S by K. Patrick

13 reviews

savvylit's review against another edition

emotional reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Mrs. S as a story can best be described as sensual sapphic academia. Author K. Patrick has skillfully created settings that are so evocative that they nearly feel like secondary characters. An all-girls boarding school in the Spring, a rose garden, a car-filled junkyard. Most essential though, is the steamy, slow-burn, situational affair at the center of this novel. It progresses in a very real-feeling way.

I really enjoyed this book -- but only once I got into the rhythm of the story. Dialogue is included in descriptive paragraphs without any quotes or use of "she said" or similar identifying phrases. Here's an actual example: "I go to leave, I will have to walk them back to their dorms, to monitor them as they eat dinner, as they get ready for bed. Mrs. S stays at my side. I expect you find all of this quite strange. Me? Yes. I guess it’s not what I’m used to. No, I don’t imagine that it is. She stops before the door. I do the same. Must seem a rather extraordinary way to find a boyfriend, I expect you had simpler methods? Sure, something like that. I hold back, too exhilarated by the question, it could mean nothing. Not so old-fashioned where you’re from. Maybe more than you think. Is that so?" A bit of a challenge to get used to, but once I did, it was a much smoother and more delightful read.

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beeeenerys's review against another edition

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reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This book is hard for me to describe. I do personally align with the main character fitting into that complex grey area of butch masculinity, that was a primary reason why I liked it so much.

Even though i've tagged this as butch love I think it's more infatuation than love, exploring how it can be fun and bad at the same time, how relationships built on infatuation can damage communication and create something unhealthy despite enjoying each other. Despite that the language was really romantic, i adored it.

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jeimy's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

turns out this is one of those books that you either love or hate—and i loved it.

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5/5

📝 (spoiler-free) review:

i’ll preface this review by saying that i’m one of those readers who likes to read well written books and really pretty prose. if you’re that kind of reader too, then hopefully you’ll like mrs. s!

i was entirely captivated by how the dialogue had no quotation marks, because it forced me to take my time and really get to know each character’s voice. the boarding school setting also set the stage for all the surpressed yearning and tension that just broils over throughout the book, and has some of the most astute observations on heteronormative femininity i’ve ever read.

🔖 read this if you like:

saphic crushes and slow burns
dark academia
prose poems

💭 my fave quotes:

“She whispers something I can’t catch. I should whisper too, ask her to repeat what she said. I can’t. I will spend a lifetime wondering.”

“

She misses the point… Her heterosexuality public-facing. It’s cosy violence. Who does she want to be? If I ask her that, she might fall apart. If I ask her that, I must be willing to live through the answer.

”

“She thinks language is easy. I allowed myself to think the same, didn’t it seem a nicer way to live, to believe her language, the way she possesses it. When she is not around, I invent her. When she is around, I invent her."

can’t you just tell that the author is a poet? 🥹

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raphynette's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

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camillessi's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Diverse cast of characters? No

4.5

I'm so conflicted on what to rate this book.

On the one hand, I was objectively aware the whole time that the writing was pretentious, the lack of dialogue spacing and tags a style that always seems to try too hard in my mind. But if I ignored the part of me that kept noticing that, the prose was excellent. I could so clearly understand the emotional turmoil within our protagonist. Maybe it's because I'm also a lesbian? Something about the way it was written struck a note with me. I have never felt so seen in a lesbian novel before.

I don't know. The last 30 pages I kept wondering, what do I think of this book? What do I think of it objectively? Is it something I would recommend to other people? How does it make me feel at the end?

Even the way I'm writing this review is sounding more flowery than I usually would write.

Anyway, I still don't know how I feel about the book or how it made me feel. But like I said, I feel like this is written specifically for lesbians. In the end, I felt like I had to give it 4.5 stars. Would otherwise be a 5, but the strange dialogue choices irritated me; I felt like I could never get used to it and kept getting confused.

But it's been a while since I gave a book 5 stars on here, so I decided to round up instead of down.

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jesshindes's review against another edition

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challenging reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

'Mrs S' is about an Australian woman in her early 20s who comes to England to take up a sort of general assistant job in a girls' boarding school. While there she begins an affair with the headmaster's wife, the titular (older, maybe 40-ish) Mrs S. And... that's mostly the story.

The protagonist is (probably?) a butch lesbian figuring things out about her identity; not her sexuality, as such, but how she inhabits it and her body; her gender. This is lent weight by the context, full of teenage girls (the Girls, as they're referred to throughout) who are also grappling with expectations around femininity and sexuality, and by the book's two other main characters: Mrs S (ostensibly in a heterosexual relationship with her husband, probably more bound by social expectations than she might like to admit) and the Housemistress (the other gay woman on staff). I really liked the way that the narrator's friendship with the Housemistress developed; there's a mixture of admiration, solidarity, envy to their interactions and what begins as a fairly tentative camaraderie ends up being a really meaningful relationship by the time the novel comes to a close (I would argue, more meaningful than the romance). In fact when I was trying to think about what the book was ~about I think it's probably about queer solidarity as much as anything; certainly that feels like where it lands up, although it's not really how the book's been marketed.

I found Patrick's style a challenge: there are no speech marks in the novel and most of the sentences are short, almost staccato, which makes it difficult to read fluently. I was constantly being brought up and forced to re-read, trying to understand who was saying what, which parts were being thought and which spoken aloud. This lack of specificity is echoed by other choices; as you may be able to tell from my discussion above, nobody in the book has names (only titles), the Girls often merge into a singular mob, and there's no indication at any point of the time period in which the novel is taking place. (There doesn't seem to be any mobile phone use, but there is a gay bar in the nearby town - I was guessing the 90s?) By the time I got to the end I didn't mind the prose styling so much - perhaps I'd got used to it - but at the outset I felt like the book was fighting me a bit. I think it's still worth it regardless but it's probably a personal preference thing; if you don't mind taking time over something that doesn't make fluency of reading its first priority, that forces you to slow down and take your time.

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bronzeageholly's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

“If I could choose a different chest I would choose this water. If I could choose a different body I would choose this water”

This beautiful book felt like dipping into someone’s mind, like slipping off the edge of a pool and finding it’s deeper than you thought.

The tension, the longing, the summer heat. Mrs S is a sensual, delicious dive into sexuality and gender, into watching and being watched, into what it’s like to live in your own or other people’s ‘natural’.

The themes of performance and of nature (with key motifs of water, earth, the moon) were carefully and clearly positioned throughout the text: each with transformative powers poignant to the metamorphosis of the protagonist. Through the main character’s observations of light and scent we understand how they view the world and the actions of others. Each relationship formed was palpable, with moments of humour just as precious as the moments of drama.

There was something deeply personal and deeply reflective about this text that I could not demand loudly enough that everyone reads this book.

((definitely an 18+ read!))

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