Sedating Elaine

February 1, 2022
To get the two grand she needs to pay a drug dealer, Frances invites her large, suffocating, overwhelming, and loving girlfriend Elaine to move into her London flat. But Frances, a walking bundle of suppressed trauma, can't handle the constant live-in interactions, so she talks her dealer into fronting her a sedative for Elaine. This premise is contextualized as madcap rather than problematic, and the stretching required to make it work can be intense. Yet, title aside, this is actually a novel of deep, transformative healing. Think Weekend at Bernie's meets Cheryl Strayed. Over the course of a few days, everything that can go wrong does, and Frances experiences sedation's opposite: awakening. Her memories, her beliefs, her family connections, and her self-concept all rise to the surface and demand reexamination. Debut novelist Winter oscillates between the satirically ridiculous (threats regarding pay-up enforcer Betty, known to burn genitals with a straight iron) to the profoundly important (how to forgive). The effect is a little uneven, but the novel remains thoroughly interesting, unusual, and compelling.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 7, 2022
Winter’s sharp debut blends humor and emotional reflections with an exploration of trauma, substance abuse, and dysfunctional relationships. Frances, a kitchen worker at a London café, determines to break up with her girlfriend, the cheerful and sexually insatiable Elaine. Quiet and standoffish, Frances uses sex, drugs, and alcohol to numb the pain of being left by her ex Adrienne. After a debt to her weed dealer Dom reaches £2,000, Dom threatens to have her roughed up. She reverses her plans with Elaine and asks her to move in with her, planning to use Elaine’s rent money to settle the balance. But when Elaine’s subsequent jubilation becomes too suffocating to bear, Frances opts to drug her girlfriend with a sedative procured from Dom, just until the debt is paid and Frances can end their relationship. The outrageous plan soon goes awry, prompting a reckoning that forces Frances to consider her past relationships—with Adrienne, with her late father, and with the estranged mother who abandoned her—in a new light. Written in moving and candid prose, this takes an unflinching look at what troubled people are capable of, and what they might need to be healed. The result is amusing and touching in equal parts. Agent: Susan Ginsburg, Writers House.

February 15, 2022
A woman must navigate the demands of her sexually voracious girlfriend while staying one step ahead of her drug dealer's terrifying enforcers, Betty and the Ladies. Frances owes money to her dealer, Dom. She has one week to pay up or else he'll have no choice but to call in his enforcer, Betty, who does horrifying things with a straightening iron to encourage payment. To make matters worse, Frances' new girlfriend, Elaine, has become so demanding of her time that Frances has determined to dump her, just as soon as she can get a word in edgewise. But when Dom delivers a warning directly to Frances' flat, she realizes that desperate times call for desperate measures. In exchange for monthly rent, Frances invites the irrepressible Elaine to move in with her, an agreement to which Elaine enthusiastically agrees. Frances is an emotionally stunted character, still grieving the breakup of her relationship with the woman she believes to be the love of her life, still suffering from her mother's childhood abandonment, so overwhelmed by the world that she has stayed in the same dishwashing job for years because the routine brings a numbing escape from her feelings. In spite of Frances' truculence, Elaine--who is bouncy, bubbly, raunchy, and desperately needy--is head over heels in love and sets about remaking Frances in the image of someone capable of loving her back. After only a day or so of cohabitation, Frances has had enough. She embarks on a plan to keep Elaine quiet--with the help of a sedative procured by Dom and slipped into Elaine's cinnamon latte. When this plan goes predictably wrong, Frances is forced to confront the demons of her own past as she runs from the iron-wielding harpies of her future. The result is an eager, slightly unwieldy novel that suffers from its tendency to slip into an expository style. Frances' reluctance to engage with her girlfriend often slides into outright cruelty, and the fun the book pokes at the expense of Elaine's frank and overambitious sexuality mirrors that cruelty rather than diffusing or justifying it. A turn at the end seeks to ratify this dynamic, but it is too little too late to redeem "Funny Frances," as Elaine calls her, who seems willing to let almost anything happen to the people around her if it buys her a little more time to stew on her own hurt feelings. Brash and engaging on the sentence level but fails to create empathy for a main character who feels none herself.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.