Laura Kay is the author of The Split and Tell Me Everything, both published by Quercus in the United Kingdom. Wild Things is her first novel published in the United States. She lives in East London.
El is in a rut. She's been hiding in the photocopier room at the same dead-end job for longer than she cares to remember, she's sharing a flat with a girl who leaves passive-aggressive smiley face notes on the fridge about milk consumption and, worst of all, she's been in unrequited love with her best friend, effortlessly cool lesbian Ray, for years. So when a plan is hatched for El, Ray, and their two other closest friends—newly heartbroken Will and karaoke-and-Twilight-superfan Jamie—to ditch the big city and move out to a ramshackle house on the edge of an English country village, it feels like just the escape she needs. Despite being the DIY challenge of a lifetime, the newly named Lavender House has all the markings of becoming the queer commune of the friends' dreams. (will has been given a pass as the gang's Token Straight.) But as they start plotting their bright new future and making preparations for a grand housewarming party to thank the surprisingly but wonderfully welcoming community, El is forced to confront her feelings for Ray—the feelings that she's been desperately trying to keep buried. Is it worth ruining a perfectly good friendship for a chance at love?
Found family is probably this book's biggest trope—if you love cozy reads, if you love found family, if you've ever want to uproot and move to the countryside, then this is your book. My favorite moments were watching as Jamie wrangled the Twilight chickens, when El let go of her inhibitions and sang karaoke, when the gang were redoing Lavender House to make it a home. There's also a whole storyline where El volunteers with young adults and forms kinship-esque connections. Truly, this book is all about how we can choose our family (while also examining how we can maintain/accept our biological family).
If you, like me, came to this book for the romance, then I have to warn you: it's not like a lot of the romance books that sit on the romance shelves that we've come to know and love. While this one certainly fulfills some tropes—friends to lovers, forced proximity, slow burn—the focus of the novel is not the romance between Ray and El. Rather, the focus of the book is on El's self-growth—her ability to participate in "wild" activities outside of her comfort zone, her learning how to navigate the world around her, her interacting with her new world and who she wants to be inside of it. The romance does play a part, and I will say that I love the "crush" narrative, because I love the normalize having crushes outside of high school/adolescence! Even so, this book is not a romance novel.
I have a lot of thoughts about romance as a genre, and I figure that I will share them here, because this book has really helped further shape my thoughts on this. I believe that "women's fiction" is a sexist misnomer. Fiction that is written for an audience of women is fantastic and it needs to be written. But we don't have a "male fiction" designation, so why would women need a specific classification? Why can't we just shelf it all as fiction? I'm not sure if reading communities are moving away from the "women's fiction" classification; but what I do know is that we (women who read fiction) are gravitating towards romance. Wild Things is shelved as a romance because it is a fiction novel written for women that is probably meant to appeal to the women who read fiction audience. While it certainly does appeal to me as a woman who reads fiction, it does not appeal to me as a woman who reads romance novels. It just does not read like a romance novel the way that we've come to think of as romance novels! Wild Things is general fiction, and is a wonderful, cozy, romantic, and wholesome. However, continuing to shelf it as a romance novel is doing it a disservice, and I could say the same for every general fiction book that is making its way into romance sections because we are somehow refusing to allow fiction written for a primarily female audience to sit in fiction sections.
I will definitely recommend Wild Things to my friends who love cozy and charming fiction novels, and can't wait to include it in some cozy round-ups! Laura Kay is a wonderful writer, and I hope she does get some more books in the US market.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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