this book was gorgeous but slow for me, also thought the dialogue was structured confusingly and it took me a sec to get the hang of (maybe just an arc thing). it took me a long time to finish this one but i'm glad i stuck it out. a good & sensual slow burn, 90's dark academia sapphic romance. a vibe!

thanks netgalley & europa for the arc that took me a billion years to finish <3

Thank you to NetGalley and Europa Editions for allowing me to read this ARC!

Content Warning: violence, misogyny, homophobia.

At a remote English boarding school, where propriety is an enforced rule, a new woman has taken up the role of "Matron" -- and most importantly, she's a butch lesbian. Used to being an outsider looking in, but slightly taken aback by the way her appearance and "strangeness" is greeted by hostility, she grows restless in her role, concerned about her future, and extremely self-conscious. But then, she meets Mrs. S, the headmaster's wife. Mrs. S is everything the Matron is not: comfortable in her dominance and authority, and very feminine. Captivated by Mrs. S, the Matron quickly finds herself falling into an infatuation, one that will deeply change the lives of everyone around them.

Although it has taken me far, far too long to put up this review, please don't take it as a sign that I disliked this book. In fact, I think it's one of the most beautiful, arresting novels I've had the pleasure of reading this year, and there's quite a lot of stiff competition (like Lucky Red, for example, another ARC I just reviewed). Patrick's writing style is totally and completely unique: none of the characters are ever named, aside from the dauntingly gorgeous and commanding Mrs. S, and although at first you might struggle to get into the flow of Patrick's style, please do yourself a favor and do not put this down.

This is a perfect representation of being "other." The Matron, our main character and narrator, has struggled with this throughout her life, connected always to her lesbianism and butch appearance. Her relationship with her parents is extremely fraught; she comes to the English countryside, and expects her loneliness to be even more solidified, but is surprised to find that she isn't the only lesbian there. This also makes a great example of the saying "we are everywhere" -- that no matter where you go, or what people you meet, you will always find another person who is on the LGBT spectrum. For me, Patrick flawlessly and easily captures what it is like to be an outsider, especially as a woman. The sensation that you don't fit in, that all the other girls are connected somehow, and that you will forever be standing just outside of their circle.

The Matron's relationship with Mrs. S is the primary focus, but there are so many elements at play here, and Patrick handles it masterfully. The ruminations on identity are spot-on, and all of it feels like lived, authentic experience (and I assume much of it is). As their relationship develops, you feel just as the Matron does, confused and baffle and in love and wondering what kind of game Mrs. S is playing -- or if it's even a game at all.

Highly, highly recommended!

This was very slow for the first half, i kept wanting to DNF because I went into with such high hopes but was so bored. Thankfully i stuck to it, it picked up and broke my heart in the end. I want better for our main character. 3 stars because it took too long to pick up and I hated how there was no punctuation. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

there was so many aspects that makes this book the perfect read, there's a bit of dark academia and queer rep, as well as a writing style that catches your attention in a way that makes you curious on what happens next. the streamof consciousness writing style has always been my favorite and this one didn't disappoint. the only thing that had me struggling to keep up with the story was the no quotation marks. other than that one detail, i loved this read! it was short, blunt, queer and full of what could be seen as mundane moments. definitely a great read to end this year's pride month with.

Sometimes, we read a book that shifts time. That changes us. That opens a chasm through which we can measure a "before" & an "after." Mrs. S, the debut novel from K Patrick, is one such book.

The book follows an unnamed narrator, the new matron at an all-girls school (who the students, The Girls as they are called, only refer to as Miss), as she navigates her new position, her desire to see & be seen, & her infatuation and eventual love affair with the headmaster's wife, the titular Mrs. S. From page one, I was pulled into the narrator's voice, like a leaf drifting down a current. With its short, staccato-like syntax, & poetic turns of imagery & metaphor, K Patrick's prose is nothing short of revolutionary. Each moment is entirely present, fully embodied in the text. Every anxious thought, moment of second-guessing, deciphering of body language is something we experience alongside the narrator. There is a radical sort of honesty to the text & the way we move through the narrator's discovery of herself & her desires.

I was struck by the narrator's sense of difference, as she searches to know herself, while I was also reminded that only one letter separates her (Miss) from the object of her desires (Mrs. S). On the level of desire, they may not be so different after all. But it is always difference that separates.

This novel is horny. Queer. Erotic. Lesbian. Butch. You can feel it in the fabric of the language, in the way descriptions drip with desire. I couldn't help but think of Barthes' A Lover's Discourse. There are sensual repetitions of mouths, hands, & water imagery. But it is also full of moments of queer discovery & community. Some of my favorite scenes are those between the narrator & the Housemistress, another lesbian working at the school who takes the narrator under her wing.

There is only a version of myself I know after reading Mrs. S. I have been seen. I have been written into the record. This is not to say that my own experience is directly akin to that of the narrator here. But the honesty, the complicated intertwining of desire & transformation laid bare, that is what has left me changed.

Thanks NetGalley for the eARC. Buy this book!

Some quotes I loved (and highlighted once I picked up a physical copy of the book):

"I float. If I could choose a different chest I would choose this water. If I could choose a different body I would choose this water."

"Forever in love with the word. Lesbian. The slow sexuality of it, a snake in the mouth."

"Estuaries of neon veins, knuckles rising like moons. Nails short, a practical choice, although this too I happily convert into concealed lesbianism. Everything is a sign."

"This is what it is to be wanted. Loving her will be impossible. There is nothing I can do to stop it."

"The most painful desire of all, surely, to want somebody to be moved, to want to be so significant."

"To talk it through, to use language as it is already known, requires how I feel to be a fixed state. It isn't. A self always on the move."

I set out to read a book by every writer on Granta’s influential list of the best British novelists under 40. This extraordinary debut has already made it worthwhile.

This is a novel about queer desire, so what better setting than a girl’s boarding school. But it isn’t jolly hockey sticks and schoolgirl romance. The protagonist is a young Australian, temporarily employed as a matron and the object of her lust is the Headmaster’s wife, Mrs S. The narrator is a person out of place. She has no time for the traditions of this institution, the annual fell run, or the veneration of the famed alumnus, The Dead Author.

The time in which the novel is set isn’t made clear but is seemingly the early 90s. The language used to in relation to the narrator’s queerness reflects that. She is referred to and refers to herself as a lesbian. She doesn’t object to the use of female pronouns, which I’m reflecting in my language, though it’s telling that I’m feeling uncomfortable doing so. I have to wonder whether the character would describe themselves as trans were the story set now. She binds her chest and envies male bodies. When she goes swimming she wears a t-shirt and not the swimming costume she has forgotten how to wear. In a crucial scene she is asked about the binder and struggles to explain that it is about masculinity rather than being ‘like a man’:

‘She needs more detail. I don’t know, I never know, how to provide It. To talk it through, to use language as it is already known, requires how I feel to be a fixed state. It isn’t. A self always on the move. I give in to a simplicity I don’t believe in. I guess, yeh, it lets me feel more manly.’

I’ve read that Patrick K wanted to write a “horny novel”. Mission accomplished. The novel is sensual and at time so frankly erotic that this reader felt quite flustered. The writing is intense, with short, fragmentary sentences in long, breathless paragraphs. It seems that the writing has proved a barrier for some people, based on some other reviews. But for me it was powerful, atmospheric and beautifully written.

One of the best books I’ve read this year.

Mrs S is an intoxicating and slightly obsessive sapphic romance set against the backdrop of an all-girls boarding school. It's a largely introspective novel that primarily takes you inside the minds of our main character and narrator known only as Miss, a newly employed matron, who rapidly develops a more than platonic interest in the headmaster's wife, Mrs S. This will be somewhat relatable to every one of us to varying degrees as I feel we have all felt infatuation with a new lover or love interest before, just not at quite this extreme. I often feel stylistic choices in prose can make or break a book, and this is no different.

I thought the decision to refer to only one character by their actual name or at least initial (Mrs S) and the rest of the cast by their role only was inspired; this helps create the stifling claustrophobic feeling that the dynamic/relationship between Mrs S and Miss is the only thing that matters, the focal point, and pulls you into their world; a world set apart from others. Patrick also purposefully fails to utilise any marks that indicate dialogue which makes careful reading necessary, especially initially, and will not appeal to everyone, but I didn't find it as troublesome as I thought I might.

There is also very little use of expected punctuation and no paragraph breaks. This is a compelling and emotionally resonant gay love story ideal for Pride month that highlights the taboo nature of lesbian relationships even at this time and not only the pressure they were under to keep their love affair secret for the sake of Mrs S and her marriage, their job security and especially keeping the rumours and remnants of a gay relationship from doing the rounds at the boarding school, but also the endless drama and tension that came from keeping such a large secret while sneaking around and seeking stolen moments with each other behind the backs of their colleagues.

It's full of suspenseful scenes and the pages simply ooze sex, temptation and longing despite this not being something I would usually enjoy in a book. It's done so well and the ever-increasing danger of being discovered is impossible to ignore. This is an incisive and nuanced inner monologue with many tender and moving moments and encapsulating the complexities of gender identity, female desire, social standing/positions of power and the stark differences/duplicitousness between our public and private faces.

Mrs. S by K Patrick really was such a sublime and sensual read. I really enjoyed every part of this book. I especially loved the queer representation.

Happy to highlight this new release in “Loud & Proud,” a round-up of new and notable reads for Pride Month, in the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

a book so moving that it got me over my phobia of authors not using quotation marks!! huge

wow what an amazing book - i really wasn't expecting to fall in love with this like I did. The first 10 pages really challenged me with the form; no quotation marks or paragraph breaks with the dialogue, very stream of consciousness which are usual deterrents for me. once I got accustomed to the style, I actually really liked the format. It was more playful and unique than most books, some paragraphs feeling more like poetry.

obviously I loved the sweeping romance - the lesbian pining, the torrid affair, the age gap, the forbidden romance (all my favorite qualities in a sapphic romance novel, sue me) but I also just really adored the protagonist. I loved the way they thought about the world. I loved how despite the insecurities of moving through the world as a lesbian and a butch one at that, they loved being a lesbian. I often find in sapphic lit, the word lesbian isn't often used. It's subbed out for words such as queer, sapphic, "I don't really like labels" and i found this novel so refreshing in the way it reveled in the word. I don't think I've read a lesbian fic book with a protagonist like this; showing the spectrum of how you can be a lesbian (the protag doesn't really use the words "trans" or "non-binary" but wears a binder and finds themselves outside of the gender binary and is figuring out what that means to them).

the part that brought me to tears while reading this was the friendship between the protag. and the Headmistress. Unabashed lesbian friendship and love. The way the Headmistress really opened our main character's eyes to what platonic lesbian love can be and how they can open their hearts to being loved. Ugh i could cry again.

One of my favorite reads of the year.

I liked, did not love this one. Thematically and atmospherically it’s very compelling: a story about queer desire and isolation set at an English all-girls’ boarding school, probably in the 90s though it’s never made explicit. Our protagonist, a 22-year-old butch lesbian who has moved from Australia to serve as the Matron, is cut off from everything that isn’t the school, and in this stultifying, stale atmosphere, she cultivates an obsession with the headmaster’s wife. She struggles to establish authority over the girls and feels alienated by the girlish rituals that, not so long ago, made her a teenage outsider. I didn’t love the writing itself - though there were some infrequent lovely moments - and I think it should have been shorter. There’s a sense of creeping tension that would have been more effective as a novella, and the ending is so abrupt that it feels tacked on to a book that often takes its time getting anywhere. Parts of it are repetitive, but not repetitive enough to feel like a deliberate literary device. Ultimately, I wanted this to feel more obsessive and claustrophobic than it did. I think it’s a promising debut from K. Patrick, and I’ll keep my eye out on what they do next.

Thank you to NetGalley and Europa Editions for the eARC of <i>Mrs. S</i>. All opinions are my own.

There's a line in <i>Lolita</i> where the narrator says of Lolita, the object of his obsession, that she was "safely solipsized." I kind of feel like I am, too, after reading K Patrick's debut novel <i>Mrs. S</i>. In this interior storytelling, the reader is a helpless victim to the unnamed narrator's perspective. Every single thing except Mr. and Mrs. S, the headmaster and headmaster's wife of an elite girl's English boarding school, go unnamed. There's "the Girls," "the Headmistress," "the Nurse," and, her ghost ever-looming over everyone, "the dead author," a famous alumna of the school. What we do know—the narrator is a woman uncomfortable with her assigned-at-birth gender, Australian, young, and gay—is given to us in dribs and drabs, since we are bounced around the narrator's brain like a pinball for most of the novel, on board for the tumultuous ride of her emotions, self-talk, and view of the unfamiliar world around her.

The story is luscious, sensuous, and claustrophobic. The narrator fixates on the named Mrs. S, the headmaster's wife who has also taken a keen interest in her. The two grow closer, and as they do, the narrator grows nearly obsessive.

The prose is beautiful, but as beautiful as it is, this book was challenging to read. Not only is everyone generically unnamed, but there are no quotation marks or dialogue markers—the reader must pay absolute attention to context and infer when the speaker has changed, who says what, just another way that we are sucked into the interior world of the narrator.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It was drenched in sexuality and sex, passion and attraction. Just be ready to read it when you're not half-asleep, because otherwise you'll probably miss half of what is going on.

DNF at 33%. This one had so many ingredients that I usually love — queer representation, romance, dark academia vibes. But unfortunately it didn’t quite work for me. The prose was very stream of consciousness, with no quotation marks or even line breaks in conversations. I found this a bit challenging to follow at times. That said, I can see why this book is getting so much attention, and I think it’ll be a great fit for a lot of readers who are up for this style of writing! I hope to give it another try, perhaps when I’m in a different headspace.

Big thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. It’s out very soon, so check it out at your local library or indie!

Mrs. S is a gorgeously written, stylistically experimental, slow-burn exploration of queer attraction, gender, and coming of age. Our narrator is in her 20s, teaches at an all-girl's boarding school, a transplant from Australia and quite openly a lesbian. She befriends the housemistress as someone with shared queer experience, and falls into an illicit affair with the headmaster's wife -- Mrs. S.

There are interesting stylistic choices from the way no one is really given a name beyond their titles, the students are ambiguously a single unit of "The Girls" and sort of blend with each other as characters. The book does not utilize any quotation marks in a very and there's not even paragraphs between the dialogue. So the whole work and conversations blend together and can become very confusing on who is saying what, what is being thought versus spoken, etc.

The writing feels a bit pretentious in a way that even while I could enjoy it, stylistically got a bit frustrating at times and it definitely isn't for everyone. The work has hints of quiet humor and reflective observation of the heteronormative society that exists around our narrator and how it can stifle younger generations.

Overall, Mrs. S is stream-of-conciousness in its text and beautifully woven with producing feelings of queer yearning. The dynamics and characters are fleshed out and none of the relationships are quite so simple. It is a text one needs to sit with, and while I wish I enjoyed it more than I did, there's a lot of value in what is being explored. The book simply captures the mundane nature of life and the mess of identity.

The unconventional writing style juxtaposed with the familiar feelings of queer longing and desire play out beautifully in Mrs S. Fans if sapphic fiction get ready to enjoy!

A butch outsider from Australia takes the job as “matron” at an all-girls’ boarding school. Though an outsider, she finds friendship with one of the housemistresses and falls head over heels in love with the headmaster’s wife, Mrs. S. Throughout her time there, the two embark on a slow-burning, elicit affair that leaves the main character into a coming-of-age journey in her twenties.

All I needed to hear about this one was boarding school, lesbians, and adults. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a queer YA set at a boarding school any day of the week, but it’s a nice break to have the adults do the romance thing every now and again as well. It was a little harsher than I expected, more brutal and somewhat honest about the nature of affairs and relationships rather than romantic and hopeful. Dramatic, for sure, it’s a slow burn of a book, not just the romance, but the whole thing unfolds slowly from the main character’s point of view. From the rush of first kisses to the crushing reality of affairs with married women. I recommend, but not if you’re looking for a typical, queer romance.

I’m writing this, looking over the passages I saved when reading through the novel for the first time, I am legitimately almost overwhelmed; this is writing of an extraordinary caliber, writing I am actively astonished by.

The unnamed narrator of Mrs S., K Patrick’s stunning debut novel, is a young person from Australia, spending a year abroad, chaperoning at a historic boarding school for girls (who are called always the Girls, and never identified individually by name). It’s here that the narrator falls for the headmaster’s wife, the titular Mrs S., a paragon of feminine beauty; a beautifully-paced slow-burn affair follows. It can still feel shocking to me when a novel so invested in interiority and psychological portraiture is as deftly plotted as Patrick’s debut; sometimes when we talk about writing, I think externality and interiority are pitted against one another, like it’s possible only to have or focus on one of the two, when the best writers—and K Patrick is an incredible writer—show that this is an arbitrary, borderline meaningless categorical distinction when talking about the possibilities of fiction.

Patrick’s narrator is an outsider whose life beyond the story is largely unknown to the reader, and the beauty of this is that the interior life of the character is so vividly painted that what little background is given feels more than sufficient. We know they are in their early twenties; we know they have somewhat recently broken up with an ex; we know they have a poor relationship with their father. Much else of the biography is obscured. But in its place there are passages that cut deep into the heart of who the character is, such as this one, as the narrator looks into the mirror: “[...] something else has happened to my eyes. They can no longer be placed. The colour a light brown, some depth, then a limit. People mistake me for cold. I don’t know what it means when it is said to me, to be cold. That I am not able to be immediately understood, to be read one way or another.”
And this interiority is grounded in a deep understanding of writing about bodies, of writing about the body in space. Patrick is particularly attentive to body language and subtext. A short description that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “Beside me Mrs. S shifts, places her hands between the small of her back and the wall.” It’s so simple, and the type of movement I recognize both seen it and made it often myself, but I can’t think of any other time I’ve read a description of that body language in fiction. The narrator’s hyperawareness of these things is a phenomenal embodiment, or playing out, of Roland Barthes’s comment in A Lover’s Discourse: “This is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.”
Much of the novel is concerned with this kind of careful observation, the attempt to sort out projection from signals. The Girls seem to be a kind of mirror through which the narrator can see signs of their own desire and fear of transparency. After Mrs S. shows the Girls how to better handle a paintbrush, they “[...] examine their own knuckles. Subtly, or at least what they think is subtle, tightening and loosening their hands around their paintbrushes.” The Girls are always casting sidelong glances, modulating their bodies to match interactions, grasping at approval: notably, the Girls, too, crave the seemingly holy rays of Mrs S.’s attention. The fact of both the narrator and the Girls attending so carefully to their own behavior around Mrs S. seems to be a statement about her authority; it seems to me that this kind of self-regulation on the part of the narrator, even as a fellow faculty member, is an explicit result of the power and age differential between Mrs S. and themself.

The style is a serious achievement: here is prose deserving of the oft-cited adjective “taut”; Patrick writes mostly in short, tense sentences, and these are punctuated by the diction of high lyricism, by figurative language, creating vivid points of contact with (often the physical, natural) world. And then Patrick is playful with syntax in a way that feels true to speech and thought. All of this serves the most gripping aspect of the novel, for me, which is its portrait of a complex subjectivity, of someone very self-conscious and struggling with the reality of performativity across multiple spheres.
It’s clear that the narrator feels uncomfortable with traditional femininity but doesn’t seek an entirely masculine identity, either, instead feeling out a middle ground, though where exactly it lies is never addressed with a label, something I appreciate and am excited by. A crucial moment in the novel is a conversation where Mrs S tries to sound the narrator’s relationship to gender, why it is that they wear a binder. “She needs more detail,” the narrator thinks. “I don’t know, I never know, how to provide It. To talk it through, to use language as it is already known, requires how I feel to be a fixed state. It isn’t. A self always on the move.”

At its heart there’s a struggle here between solidity with its defined boundaries, and fluidity with its permeable ones; Mrs S. with her vicarage, her husband, her position in the school and community, her life calcified around her, and the narrator, still young, with their necessarily transient position, on visa in another country, life still flexible. Perhaps this defiance of stasis is the most moving thing about the novel. “I am changing,” the narrator says at the novel’s end, “I have always been changing.”

Mrs. S is a hard book to describe. It’s about an Australian butch lesbian taking the job of Matron at an English boarding school and falling for the headmaster’s wife, but that seems somehow like it’s removing half of its depth. At the same time, though, what more can I say about it? It’s one that you have to read to fully get.

The writing style in this is something between stream of consciousness and a more regular style and it takes a little getting used to, not least because speech is neither marked with quotation marks nor a new line. On occasion, that makes it hard to tell who is saying what, but surprisingly still not as much as you might expect.

It also makes it quite easy to find yourself absorbed by this book. It’s set during a hot summer and that headiness makes its way off the page to the reader. It feels as though you’re reading this on a hot summer day, regardless of when you’re actually reading it. And the desire too, of our narrator for Mrs. S, of the Housemistress for something more, all of that is equally real to the reader. No matter that these people don’t get given names really, that the schoolchildren are only ever The Girls, you can feel everything about them so vividly at times.

However, and this is going to sound completely at odds with what I’ve just said, there’s still a sense of being held at arm’s length from everyone. Perhaps this too ties to the lack of names. The narrator is obviously the most fleshed out of the characters, since it’s in her POV, and it makes sense that Mrs. S seems more dreamlike to her, unknowable, because that’s part of her appeal. But I found myself wanting to know a bit more about the other characters, about the Housemistress in particular, and The Girls. The latter definitely felt like one big indiscernible mess, which was probably intentional but I’m not sure if it worked.

In the end, then, this was merely a 3 star read for me. Good, but never something I felt amazed by. An enjoyable use of time, but sadly not much more.

Thank you netgalley for the arc of this book! In theory, I would have loved this. And truth is, I still might. Once it is released I will definitely attempt this again. However, where this lacked for me was its formation, and lack of editing. It made the overall reading experience quite difficult. There is potential here, again, I will check this out after it’s release, but I DNF’d at 15%.

The book's writing is not going to be for everyone, and I seemed to have fallen onto the side where the writing style didn't fit my personal taste. However, that didn't stop me from liking the plot. The plot was intriguing, and the tension between the characters kept me invested in the story. The lack of quotation marks in the arc made it confusing to follow along with who was speaking and where they were. There was some stylistic things within the novel that didn't make much sense to me such as the quotation marks or some of the prose which hindered my liking for the novel as a whole.