Magma

Gods, I'm reading some real doozies. Trigger warning here for emotional abuse, rape, gaslighting, cutting, and just general entitled white male assholery.

Lilja is seeing a man she's never able to straight-up call her boyfriend. He's awful and cheats on her, coerces her into sexual positions she doesn't want, convinces her she's nuts, isolates her, is rude to her friends and family, wakes her up with sex, and is a colossally horrible person. This reads like poetic prose, and you can tell it's a novel written by a poet. Not my favorite style for a novel, but this felt so very realistic that I feel like the author has lived this. It's heartbreaking and ire-inducing. There is a small glimmer of hope at the end. A tiny one. But it's not great.