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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
inspiring
reflective
informative
reflective
slow-paced
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
hopeful
mysterious
medium-paced
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Read this book in hopes that I never date (or become) a codependent lesbian.
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Febos's insightful prose and thoughtfulness are on full display here as always. I love her writing and I love her ability to look critically at herself and her life. "Ugh, the pain of being ordinarily terrible,," she writes after discovering she has a pattern of people-pleasing and using lovers. But I didn't like this book as much as Girlhood or Abandon Me, and it's mostly because of some poor marketing that coloured my expectations.
Most of The Dry Season is about why Febos needed to be celibate, ie about her history of toxic and otherwise harmful relationships, not about other types of pleasure she discovered while celibate. I don't have a problem with this focus, I found it compelling most of the time, but it wasn't the book the subtitle -- "a memoir of pleasure in a year without sex" promised it would be.
Alsio, while the histories of celibate women throughout history were interesting, the vast majority of them didn't choose celibacy for reasons even remotely connected to Febos and her situation. This made the book felt a bit disjointed.
I'll also say I think it's a missed opportunity for a queer allosexual writer investigating celibacy and what time and space it affords you for art, work, hobbies, solitude, self-actualization, and more to not discuss asexuality and aromanticism or talk to ace/aro artists and writers about their experiences.
Most of The Dry Season is about why Febos needed to be celibate, ie about her history of toxic and otherwise harmful relationships, not about other types of pleasure she discovered while celibate. I don't have a problem with this focus, I found it compelling most of the time, but it wasn't the book the subtitle -- "a memoir of pleasure in a year without sex" promised it would be.
Alsio, while the histories of celibate women throughout history were interesting, the vast majority of them didn't choose celibacy for reasons even remotely connected to Febos and her situation. This made the book felt a bit disjointed.
I'll also say I think it's a missed opportunity for a queer allosexual writer investigating celibacy and what time and space it affords you for art, work, hobbies, solitude, self-actualization, and more to not discuss asexuality and aromanticism or talk to ace/aro artists and writers about their experiences.