Dykette
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Named one of the Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2023 (So Far) by Vogue • Named a Best Book of 2023 (So Far) by Cosmopolitan • Named a Best Book of Spring 2023 by Esquire • Named a Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of 2023 by BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, and Them
An addictive, absurd, and darkly hilarious debut novel about a young woman who embarks on a ten-day getaway with her partner and two other queer couples
Sasha and Jesse are professionally creative, erotically adventurous, and passionately dysfunctional twentysomethings making a life together in Brooklyn. When a pair of older, richer lesbians—prominent news host Jules Todd and her psychotherapist partner, Miranda—invites Sasha and Jesse to their country home for the holidays, they’re quick to accept. Even if the trip includes a third couple—Jesse’s best friend, Lou, and their cool-girl flame, Darcy—whose It-queer clout Sasha ridicules yet desperately wants.
As the late December afternoons blur together in a haze of debaucherous homecooked feasts and sweaty sauna confessions, so too do the guests’ secret and shifting motivations. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple’s future.
Unfolding over ten heady days, Dykette is an unforgettable love story at the crossroads of queer nonconformity and seductive normativity. With propulsive plotting and sexy, wickedly entertaining prose, Jenny Fran Davis captures the vagaries of desire and the many devastating places in which we seek recognition.
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Three Brooklyn couples descend on a Hudson Valley farmhouse over Christmas in Davis's waggish send-up of lesbian culture (after Everything Must Go). The reader's guide through the gay yuletide antics is Sasha, a high-femme graduate student whose relationship with Jesse hits the skids after she overhears Jesse's virtual therapy appointment: "It feels like I'm starving for love, and she's feasting on it." The house is owned by Jules, a primetime newscaster à la Rachel Maddow, and Jules's partner, Miranda, a therapist with a podcast. They're soon joined by Darcy and Lou, the former an artsy influencer. The six cook in the house's commercial-sized kitchen, hike in the Catskills, and sip hot drinks made with oat milk. Together, they revisit the 1990s film Boys Don't Cry, and Sasha lusts after Miranda while thinking about Chloë Sevigny. Meanwhile, Darcy, whom Sasha dismisses but secretly envies, pronounces the film "dated." The couples' extended stay becomes more fraught after Jesse and Darcy take to livestreaming an erotic art performance, and Sasha, who thought she'd incorporate the trip into her graduate research on queer domesticity, reexamines her fantasies and theories. Though there's a bit too much exposition, Davis delights in upending concepts of gender and sexuality. It's more digressive than propulsive, but it's worth adding to the weekend bag.
