T.S. Harris, Watery Bliss, 2016
(November 14) I really liked this -- inhaled it in one sitting -- and was struck by how much it was like Conversations With Friends: the characters are all associated with the literary world and the main character has a very flat affect.It was highly recommended by Goop and there was a long queue for it at the library, two pretty good signs for a work of fiction.
And I think it’s a good novel, charming and absorbing, with the summer-fall romance ending up not so implausible (this trope usually beggars belief so I was wary). The original Goop description made it all extremely seductive too because of their excitement over the ending. After a few pages with these characters you realize the ending could be almost anything -- and because there are a lot of Trump-horror-show allusions, to classism, racism, and violence, you realize any ending could be really nightmarish. The tension builds all right.
An interesting feature of this novel is that there are quite a few first-person narrators handling the story and I love the dimensions this provides.
Did I like it as much as Conversations With Friends??? I think so.
