Likeable and complex female character, sad sometimes, complicated other times this book was a good read.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to review this book and to be an early reader via NetGalley! However, I will not be writing a review for this title at this time, as my reading preferences have since changed somewhat. In the event that I decide to review the book in the future, I will make sure to purchase a copy for myself or borrow it from a library. Once again, thank you so much for providing me with early access to this title. I truly appreciate it. Please feel free to contact me with any follow-up questions or concerns.

Books about sex addiction aren't really my cup of tea. The main character was also insanely unlikable. It's more of a "this is me, not you" thing with this book. It was well written.

Ahhhh, Leila writes some effed up characters and I am HERE for it! Lol! Adele and her husband are some miserable people who I never really rooted for or felt attached to but the way Leila writes her books always keeps me going along for the ride. I was particularly curious as to what would happen once they moved out of the city and was kind of hoping she'd be a complete disaster again. The ending felt slightly abrupt to me but I'm okay with it. More! More books!

‘People who are never satisfied destroy everything around them.’ That message I think Leila Slimani painfully expresses in the novel. I believe this book has mixed reviews because the main character is a woman with a perfect life, rich doctor husband, a young son, interesting job as a journalist, basically has everything at her fingertips, but she's unhappy with this society's idea of a picturesque life and she frequently strays outside her marriage. Her sex addiction leads her to sleep with the most random array of men, with little to no remorse.
Admittedly, when I finished this book, my first thought was "eh, so what?" On the surface, it's a basic read, even the sex scenes are written in a mechanical way. But after some thought, the way that Slimani frames the story is designed to make have mixed emotions and opinions. There's no question that Adèle is an "unlikeable" character, but if you stick through the third act, additional perspectives are introduced and it makes for an interesting character study. More of a 3.5 read than a pure 4.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

DNF at 15%

This book is just not for me. I cannot relate to the main character and I found her to be self-centered with a complete disregard for others' feelings or any consequences. So far it has only been told in Adele's point-of-view but it is not an interesting one. She just goes from assessing who she can see herself having sex with on the train to being annoyed by her son's general existence. It did not seem like the plot was going to be any more than a chronology of emotionless sexual partners.

I would not recommend this book for any reader but I would especially not recommend it for anyone who may be triggered or offended by: foul language, explicitly sexual scenarios, and infidelity.

This recently translated book is the story of a 'woman on the edge'. Adele is a journalist, the wife of a successful surgeon and the mother to a beautiful baby. Despite having anything she could ever want, Adele is not happy. She has an uncontrollable self-destructive desire living within her.

This is more than just the story of a woman. This is the story of addiction. The story of how addiction, in this case, to sex, can control and dominate a person's entire psyche. The writing is beyond outstanding. I literally could not put this book down.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the advance copy of this book in exchange for a review.

What happens when a woman with an uncontrollable sex addiction tries to lead a family life? Adele tells the story of this situation where a wife and mother is leading a double life in order to fulfill her addiction. This book is extremely unique and is interesting to read from Adele’s point of view - there are many times I wanted to reach out and shake her and say WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! but, that’s exactly what feeds this story. So short it almost reads as a novella, it’s definitely worth the read.

Adele: A Novel is the story of a woman who seems to have it all. She is a working journalist, she's married to a doctor, she has a son and she has more money than she needs. But Adele is not happy. She has a problem. A big problem. A problem which could tear the life she has built apart. Adele loves sex, but not so much with her husband. Adele is obsessed with extra marital sex and affairs. All unbeknownst to her husband.

But as you continue to read you start to wonder if it is really about the sex or are there underlying issues which like an addiction, makes her crave with need, but afterwards feel guilty and dead.

The story follows her journey as she begins to feel tremendous guilt for what she has been doing, yet unable to stop herself begins to make mistakes...perhaps unconsciously? in the hopes of getting caught? One wonders.

The book is both sexually charged and extremely sad as your heart races and you feel Adele's confusion and guilt and anxiety. There is a bit of embarrassment as you, the reader, are a fly on the wall and can almost feel and see the choices and sometimes mistake she makes.

Leila Slimani is also the author of The Perfect Nanny which was a New York Times Bestseller in 2018.

Thank you #NetGalley #Penguin Books for the advanced copy. Adele will be out on January 15.

First of all, I wish to thank both NetGalley and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book, however, 30% in and I just couldn't continue. Mostly because I'm a bit tired of books where protagonists are beautiful women who have no real ambition in life other than to be married to a rich man and then treat their current spouse horribly and just complain about everything. It just feels like it's very limiting when authors depict women as only wanting to be a trophy wife. And Adele was simply not a likeable character nor one of those unlikeable charismatic characters. So for the portions I read, it just wasn't up to all the hype.

Oh me, oh my! What did I just read???

This is a story about a young Parisian woman married to her surgeon husband with whom she has a young son. She is a successful journalist and her life appears to be perfect to anyone that may cast a glance her way, however, there is something stirring within Adele that she is unable to resist.

Adele suffers from sex addiction which she keeps hidden away from everyone except her very best friend, Lauren, who is growing weary with covering up for Adele's infidelities.

If you read Leila Slimani's book The Perfect Nanny then you know that she isn't an author that is afraid to go there and here we have another perfect example of being inside the mind of a woman that is not at all a pleasant place to be. I was a little hesitant with this one only because I don't really enjoy erotica or tons of gratuitous sex scenes in my books and obviously with the main character being a sex addict I thought that maybe I was venturing out of my comfort zone too much. However, because I loved The Perfect Nanny and her writing style I new I'd have to at least attempt this one. Here's the thing, there is nothing erotic about this book and while it's scenes were described in detail it was absolutely essential in order to tell this story and to do it proper justice. A very high "ick" factor with this one. If you think you can handle the subject matter then you will be rewarded with a fascinating character study of a disturbed mind.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Publishing for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I really tried to read this book, but I just couldn't get into it. There was no real plot, and Adele seemed so selfish and unstable for me to be interested in her story.

I requested this book because I wanted to read about the life of a modern woman in Paris. As I started reading it seemed like the main character had little soul and little charm. Also, I might have a problem with the cheating, portrayed in an amusing way. I didn't like it. Thank you Netgalley for a free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. I will keep reading until I find my next 5 star story. After that, I will keep reading!

'She wishes she were just an object in the midst of a horde. She wants to be devoured, sucked, swallowed whole.'

Adèle is more than bored, every desire she has is insatiable and nothing is going to fill that void. Adèle’s husband Richard is a surgeon who loves to spoil her with a gorgeous apartment in Paris, has pulled strings to get her the job she has as a journalist for a successful newspaper but her enthusiasm has died at work, as much as her joy in mothering their son, Lucien. Apart from fearing a baby would ruin her body and rob her idleness when she found herself pregnant, she comes to love her son but even that love couldn’t tame her urges. There is a line, “For now, she remains in her filth, suspended between two worlds, the mistress of the present tense.” Filth it is, she is numb, she isn’t really alive and there isn’t a sexual encounter anywhere that can cure what ails her. There isn’t anything erotic about her encounters either, and I don’t feel it’s meant to be, though I labeled this under erotica for readers, because of the sex. She leaves each entanglement more soiled and broken, a life mounting in lies, disappearing from her own child for seedy encounters. On a superficial level she is easy to judge, there isn’t much to like about her , she has so much more than most people and we all know the argument is you can be just as unhappy with everything as someone who has nothing, but let’s just say her standing in life is quite comfortable, minus the struggles the majority of us cope with, a day in her cushy life would be a godsend, naturally this doesn’t endear her to most readers. She is certainly an object, over and over again, as still and devoid of life as a rock.

She is the saboteur of her own happiness and security. Then there is Richard, let’s talk about Richard. It’s easier not to acknowledge the cracks in your wife, to simply play the martyr and suffer for your beloved, to tune out. Then, when Richard finally must lift his head out of the dirt he’s buried it in, he can play at savior or master depending on how you look at it. Richard can fix this, right? It’s so easy, it’s all about control. If he closes his eyes nice and tight, he won’t have to accept reality as it stands, right? Just change the scenery, Richard knows best! We’re meant to feel sorry for him, and I do to a point, but he is as much the problem as Adèle’s sexual compulsions. Nothing about her trysts soothes her suffering, she is human wreckage. “She had always thought that a child would cure her.” Why are people always looking outside themselves for the cure? Who really wants to save another person from themselves, and can you? Richard is always reaching out, trying to touch her it seems. She cannot be touched or reached, she cannot feel hence her desire to be swallowed whole, to be an object only. The novel could also be about the excruciating patience of Richard’s love, because only love that suffers is true? Right? Right? Is Richard just as sick? There is honesty though, in being in love with her still, love tangled in resentment, rage, and pain. His desire for her ‘violent and selfish’ is as corrupt as her own uncontrollable hunger and needs. They are both addicted, if you ask me. Both should be getting treatment. There is a slight peek into her family dysfunction, between she and her parents. Her own father clung to unhappiness, life among the common people not good enough for him, the closeness she had with her father, who never saw the dirty girl she was, at least according to her mother, never let his ideal of her be defiled by who she truly was at her core, eyes closed to her antics. Is she this way because of her mother, or is it an illness her father had, a deep-rooted dissatisfaction that she inherited? We’ll never know as it’s not deeply explored, but the rot began in childhood. It seems it was an either/or. It’s dad or me! That her mother punishes her for being her father’s favorite.

She is easy to despise, to feel disgusted by. Beauty hides the ugly inside, that monster lurking that won’t look so appealing as time has its way with her. By the end, I was embarrassed for Adèle. It’s such a sad spiral, I spent most of the novel just feeling pity towards her, imagine living with all that rot within, all that indifference, to walk through life so numbed that you destroy everything you have just to feel. Tell me, who the hell wants to be pitied?

One of the saddest moments is when Adèle wishes she could confide in her mother. “She was a burden to her mother when she was a child. Now she has become an adversary…” a child that never had her mother’s tenderness, and maybe because of that faces such a destructive bitterness. Maybe it’s because I am a mother that I felt that moment like a gut punch. Who would Adèle have been if she knew a moment of guidance from her mother? Her mother’s adversary, imagine that.

Publication Date: January 15, 2019

Penguin Books

An elegant but rather cold French novel about a married woman who is addicted to adulterous sex. In some ways "Adele" could be seen as a modern take on "Madame Bovary." It's an interesting idea but I could not warm to our protagonist, whose motivations are hard to fathom. I personally did like this more than "The Perfect Nanny" but I'm not sure it will appeal to readers in the same way.

Adele was somewhat of a departure from Slimani's first English translated novel, The Nanny. Adele is a well respected journalist in Paris, who grapples with a sex addiction. I think it is super important for books like this to be written by women, so that women's sexuality is portrayed realistically and I think Slimani does that. I also think she portrays the contradiction or perhaps struggle between the identity of mother vs. sexual being.
This book goes dark in many areas, but if you have read Slimani previously, then you will know that she writes dark stories.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group for granting me approval to review Adèle by Leila Slimani.

Having read and loved The Perfect Nanny, I was eager to read another novel by this author. Unfortunately, I found Adèle, the main character extremely unlikeable and not very interesting. I felt her character was similar but less thought provoking than the character of the Nanny / Lullaby. There was a gritty, edgeness to Slimani’s writing, which kept me turning the pages but my overall enjoyment was not fully satisfied. I will still look to read more from this author, but this particular work was not overly engaging or memorable.

Well. Adele uses sex to deal with her disconnection and boredom. But does it make her happy? No. This is an intriguing read but it's also one that some might end over the top. Slimani is definitely adept at probing the dark places and she writes well. This is better for not being flowery. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I'm not sure who I'd recommend this to but I'm glad to have read it.

A sex addict always hoping but never able to fill the void inside her, Adèle jeopardizes her marriage with Richard, her job, her finances, and her relationship with her son for quick and often debasing rendezvous with strangers. Adèle is also vain, judgemental, manipulative, dramatic, and often cruel.

Although the description intimates the book might have elements of a psychological thriller, in truth, the slim volume is a psychological study of a woman who cannot step back from the edge of self-destruction. Because Adèle was so unlikable, it undercut the impact of her addiction which was difficult to parse from her personality. Her ambivalent feelings toward motherhood were also interesting, but those, too, became overshadowed by her unlikeability. When she puts herself in danger and when she engages in riskier behavior, perhaps hoping to get found out, it is difficult to empathize with her.

When a character is so flawed, it seems readers always want to know why. In Adèle’s case, Slimani seems to blame a combination of her mother’s flippant cruelty as a child combined with an encounter with The Unbearable Lightness of Being at an impressionable age, but these factors to me don’t seem to justify the extremes of her behavior. While I am satisfied that at times, some behavior is inexplicable, I am less content that Slimani finds these two factors sufficient justification in the context of the book’s logic for Adèle’s behavior.

Towards the end of the book, the novel introduces Richard’s perspective demonstrating his culpability in their unhealthy dance of mutual dependence. It was a strange and to me jarring shift, and the book ended on an ambiguous and unsatisfying note.

Adèle confronts an addiction not often discussed and illuminates the perilous spiral in which addicts circle. Adèle’s experiences are vivid and visceral. Unfortunately, as a character, Adèle doesn’t spark much sympathy.

This book was just ok. This is the story of Adele' who is bored with her normal life and becomes addicted to sex with people other than her husband, Very predictable!!!