Rosenfeld
A Novel
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4.1 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Combustive.” —Esquire • “This novel should come with an X rating.” —Los Angeles Times • “All intensity and desire…will have you turning the pages as fast as you can.” —Chicago Review of Books • “A new spin on forbidden lust.” —Debutiful
For readers of Luster, All Fours, and Vladimir: a provocative, sexy, and unflinchingly candid novel about a white-hot relationship and the two complicated people who emerge from it transformed.
Noa Simon is a thirty-six-year-old filmmaker who knows what she wants, and when she meets Teddy Rosenfeld, an antagonistic, older CEO, she goes for the jugular. An electrifying encounter in a bathroom stall after their first meeting only serves to whet Noa’s appetite, and despite Teddy’s subsequent rejections, she is exhilarated by the challenge—and by her own insatiability. In her first power play, she takes a job at his office, setting up a battle of wills that Teddy proves unable to resist. Their ravenous, volatile romance will ultimately unearth difficult secrets from both of their pasts and finally force Noa to reckon with her deepest desires and most destructive impulses.
Written with visceral intensity and voyeuristic precision, Rosenfeld is an unputdownable story of sexual abandon that titillates and interrogates in equal measure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Kessler's raw if uneven debut, a couple negotiate their possibly destructive obsession with each other. When aspiring filmmaker Noa Simon meets Teddy Rosenfeld at a wedding in Tel Aviv, their attraction is immediate. Teddy, CEO at a production company, hires her to make promotional films, and they embark on a professional and romantic relationship. Noa is infatuated with the "beautiful, fat, sexy, despicable" Teddy, who is as financially generous as he is emotionally withholding ("My entire existence is reduced to the need for being the object of his desire, and all other components of life become redundant," Noa narrates). Turns out they both have mother issues: Noa is estranged from hers, while Teddy reveres his, maintaining her apartment as a "mausoleum," according to Noa, after her death. As the relationship progresses, Teddy's reticence, insistence on control, and imperious meddling eventually push Noa to her breaking point. The novel tends to drag when the two lovers are apart, but the characters come alive during the sex scenes, their desire for each other radiating off the page. Outside the bedroom (or the bathroom, or the stairwell, or the car), the story gives off less heat. This one overstays its welcome.
