She offers him a life imbued with beauty and art-and, hopefully, a reason to cut back on his drinking. But none of them really matter very much, somewhat because all of them are supposed to be complicated and hard to like, but mostly because the greatest character of my reading life is in these pages. I also found Mellors’ writing about other races and cultures a bit too confident and often super generalising in a way that felt quite ignorant or tokenising.

I was instantly drawn to Cleo and Frank and their strange interaction and I'm a sucker for the classic New York City setting; it gives me a warm vibe. There is only one novel this reminded me of, and that’s Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls which portrayed New York in the 1940’s. Cleo’s mum died when she was young and is left with a father who appears to have no personal opinion apart from the one that aligns with his new partner. When Cleo meets Frank, who is twenty years older than her, he offers her a chance for happiness for the first time in her life.Cleopatra and Frankenstein, the luminous debut novel from Coco Mellors, is a book about many things: It's a great, swooning love story; a shattering depiction of how addiction and mental illness warp our lives; and a perceptive, witty portrait of globalized New York.

And then she was running toward the lights, and the door was flinging open with a taxi still moving and Frank was stumbling out toward her, and she catapulted herself into his arms, and his lips were pressing hot and quick against her face, her ears, her hair, because it was a miracle, against all the odds he had found her here on this dark patch of road, and now everything else was forgotten, forgiven, all that mattered was that he was here, holding her close against his familiar chest, and she knew what it was to be a miracle”. And I would've appreciated a bit more time to have the characters really dig into their issues, to grapple with the fact that the world is much bigger than just the two of them; though in some ways I think that's part of the point Mellors is trying to make. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a green card. deleted my old review because i was senselessly ranting, but i still do think this felt painfully self-indulgent, more so than the works of sally rooney – of which this book has been exhaustively compared to. And also, in addition to this, there was a character I loved so much that I cried through her chapters (of which there are only two), an insanely earnest and vulnerable moment the likes of which has never occurred to me ever.while the book jumps around between a cast of characters running full-speed around new york, they all feel fleshed out and their perspectives are equally as absorbing as the one before, with witty humour laced throughout. I've noticed this book has been heavily and exhaustingly compared to Sally Rooney, which I think is irrelevant and definitely not something you should let influence your decision to read or not read the book. She lived with her mother and yes, she had a father who was gravely ill, but she didn’t seek some sort of high and had this endearing sense of insecurity which I dare say most people could relate to. I stayed attached to my tracic awfully flawed heroine, I guess that’s my greek side in me, whatever¿ (GIVE ME MORE TRAGIC AWFUL HEROINES OKAY?

The book that was on every Instagram grid and mind for the past year was a debut novel from Coco Mellors.while this seems like the classic ‘young twenty-something woman starts dating the older richer man’ story (which we all know and love), mellors’ unique narrative style offers a fresh new take. I started off quite enjoying the vibe of this (because that’s all it’s really offering is a vibe) but I’ve never read a book that is more up itself. A good book is a book that captures my mind so intently that it makes me suffer, it torments my heart and haunts me long after I've turned the final page.