I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Mrs. S is, in my opinion (grain of salt there friends), such a needed, almost groundbreaking queer novel. Queer folks also deserve vaguely British romance novels wherein next to nothing happens for hundreds of pages, and I mean that sincerely.

Starting off, the formatting of the dialogue was strange for me to get accustomed to, but I picked up on it quickly enough, and I think it forced me to read the dialogue as if it were happening in my mind’s eye — I needed to picture the characters speaking, and it gave it more weight for me. That one road bump aside, I adored this novel. It was sweet and witty and beautifully written, and felt like a quiet observance of queerness that I rarely see. There are so many things I want to say about this novel, and yet they feel trapped in my chest as I try to express its brilliance.

Just read it. I’ll likely recommend it to you if you ever ask, but take this as me saying it too. It was stunning, and is well worth your time.

Gorgeous, breathtaking, and unnerving. People are going to call this novel "understated" but they're mistaken. Rather than being understated it is a story of tremendously powerful, and yet nearly entirely suppressed desire. Not just desire for sex, but also desire for so many other things. Desire for human connection. Desire to be understood. Desire to be loved. And most of all: desire to understand oneself. It's a novel about a person trying to define her identity in a time when the words have yet to be invented. If the novel had been sent in contemporary times then the protagonist might have been comfortable reaching for words like "trans" or "trans-masc" or "nonbinary" to describe herself. Although in a way these words might have flattened the uniqueness of this protagonist, who is still searching for how to be in the world. The novel seems to hover in a time period when transness isn't yet definable or knowable or in the air as a concept, even--the early sixties, maybe--and it's almost as if this protagonist is paradoxically freed from the need to label herself, or to bow to the limitations of any given word.

She loves the word "lesbian," though. She loves the sound of the word itself, even as she is exploring a way to express an identity that encompasses a gender beyond a capital F.

The scene in which her lover asks her why she wears a binder is so good for how it captures how hard it is to define, and to explain to someone who hasn't yet thought past a gender binary--even if she is your lover--what it's like to have a body and a self that don't fit into the old paradigms.

<It's hard to explain. Please try, do try. I use it to flatten my chest...Flatten it? Yes. What, so, to be more like a man Here is another word that doesn't work. Man. I don't know if it's 'like a man,' it's more about masculinity. Same thing. I don't think it is.</I>

Well I'm absolutely bowled over, by the beauty of the language, by the subtlety of the relationships and how they unfold, and by the way K Patrick just lets this story be and lets it breathe on the page without feeling the need to sensationalize any part of it. This is a very human story.

This book was everything to me. Young transmasc working at an elite English boarding school embarks on a love affair with the headmaster's high femme wife. The sexual tension. The queer yearning. The masc/ femme dynamics. Some of the best sex scenes I've ever read. Although I read this in two days, I kept having to get up and take breaks to cool off lol. The tension between how the two of them view queerness was complex and painful. The ending was beautiful. The only reason I gave it four stars instead of five was that the broken sentences and lack of quotation marks didn't really work for me. After reading it for a bit, I was able to get into it enough so that those two stylistic choices didn't ruin my experience, but it was sometimes difficult to follow who was speaking. I'm sure there was a reason the author made these choices, but they didn't work for me as a reader. Overall though, this is one of my favorite reads of the year so far, and I will be pre-ordering immediately. I love mascs, and I love lesbians. <3

Thank you Europa Editions and NetGalley for the ARC.

This is so unapologetically gay and I was salivating the whole time reading it. I was caught a bit off guard at first by the short, choppy sentences, but I quickly realized this is how the narrator thinks. This is how the narrator sees the world. Mrs S is one of those rare books where we truly get to get inside the head of the narrator.

I love the boarding school setting. I love that Mrs S is the only character that has a name, and that the girls are referred to as The Girls or my favorite, The Girl who punched the boy. The Girls are not described in much detail, and yet our narrator interacts with them daily and clearly loves them. I love how they are all the same to her.

The premise of this novel is entrancing: an Australian woman is hired as the new matron at a posh English boarding school where the girls ritually kiss the statue of a dead author and recite poems outside in the night. The concept reminded me of Magda Szabo's <i>Abigail</i> with its similar story of cloistered girls cultishly adoring the statue of their legendary Abigail and depositing their prayers in a statue of her; in their miserable state of tortured repression, the girls marry themselves off to objects around the school, a painting, a bust, an aquarium, living out perverse experiments in imagined heterosexuality. <i>Mrs. S.</i> has similar elements of boarding school mystique: the bust of the dead author, the girls superstitiously kissing her head or tickling her chin, clandestine seances at night where they recite her poetry. It's fabulously weird.

There are a number of recent novels set in girls boarding schools (<i>The Illness Lessons</i>, <i>Oligarchy</i>, <i>The Book of Goose</i>) exploring the sinister regimes of these quartered female spaces. But the novel ultimately treats this setting as peripheral, focusing attention more on the uncertain romance that forms between the protagonist and Mrs S, the wife of the headmaster. The boarding school recedes into the background of a more carnal romance story of queer intimacy and adultery. Mrs S. is a dazzling feminine role-model. The girls all look at her elegant clothes as the standard of fashion and worry about her judgment, and the protagonist is immediately enamored with her matriarchal authority and sharp refinement. In her office hangs a suggestive Georgia O'Keefe painting of a flower. Initially it is an agonizing melodrama (is she gay or isn't she gay?) and there are many tense, ambiguous moments (changing shirts while gardening, inspecting her body for ticks, pollinating roses with a detached stigma) until the plot turns uninhibited and erotic. Boarding school lit is so often about repression and unrequited love (for example, Fleury Jaeggy's <i>Sweet Days of Discipline</i>) but <i>Mrs S.</i> is candid and decadent.

Overall, I found the style of writing too pithy. The sentences are short and there isn't much syntactic variation, and while it's not always essential, the story lacks specificity—the protagonist is never named; her closest friend is simply Headmistress; the students are only ever referred to as The Girls; and the headmaster and his wife are just the banal Mr and Mrs S. There's no sense of period or location. It robs the story of tangible realness or intimacy. In a novel like Kay Dick's <i>They</i>, the ubiquitous anonymity and vague setting give a profound sense of alienation and menacing eeriness, but here it just made it hard to feel real pathos at the end.

Overall, a fantastic debut novel. I recommend reading it as an excellent new queer novel.

Smart and beautiful and unafraid to be difficult; I wasn't at all surprised to see Garth Greenwell blurbed this book, as it really feels in conversation with Cleanness. Very voicey, stylistic, and relentlessly atmospheric, I absolutely love a queer story from the pov of a butch protagonist (finally!!) and the rural European boarding school vibes are immaculate. I think this book won't be for everyone, but it's inarguably beautiful and accomplished. This writer is talented, period.

The setting of the novel was as expected-- a forbidden romance, set against the inherent restraint and structure of an academic institution, repressed for any number of reasons--and Patrick did an exemplary job of leaning into those themes. The descriptions of the school are well done, and most scenes can be envisioned crisply in the mind's eye through careful adjectives. Similarly, the pack-like quality of teenage girls is well captured, in their fearless, yet desperate to please, antics.

The most compelling part of the story is, of course, the romance. The longing, the wishing and wondering, is well done, and the author's voice captures the discontent well. Tension is built through fleeting glances, unwilling gestures, and nervous, halting conversation. Patrick often parallels The Girls' hero-worship of Mrs. S to Miss' admiration of her, in an interesting way that speaks to the naivete of such an infatuation. The descriptions of sex seem poetic and almost monumental, like Patrick is carefully describing a holy thing, and wary of sacrilege. I think that actually works in the novel's favor, that the culmination of wondering is an equally mystical, barely grounded, extension of thought and theory.

That being said, I struggled with the jilted prose, and the sentence structure beneath it. The combination of direct description (throughout the novel not a single thing is shown, only told) and short sentences (long paragraphs, comically brief sentences) had me longing to reach through the screen and beg the narrator to adjust their punctuation to anything that would keep this story from reading in staccato. Tone, description, metaphors, sensuality, all fell second to the less-than-a-line sentence. I believe this was intentional, to show the brash, disjointed, and emotional state of the narrator, but it also meant that the reader, if they do not share that inner voice, is consistently alienated from Miss' perspective. There were some absolutely beautiful lines, some moments where that cadence paid off, but that was the minority.

Unlike others, I don't mind Patrick's aversion to using quotations to indicate conversation, as normally that's a tactic to immerse us as natural observers of the story. Unfortunately, I couldn't enjoy even that compositional technique, as the rhetoric was already obliterated by sentence structure.

I think the hardest challenge this novel faces is comparison, and unfortunately mostly with itself. When promised a sweeping, sensual, forbidden romance, I was expecting cadence, contrast, and life. The heart of this story is just submerged in an absolute commitment to structure and brevity, and that was too distracting for me to overlook. When I finished the novel I felt accomplished, like I had read something new and was better for it, but it's not something that is comforting. Ultimately, this novel was a challenge to read, but a delight to have read, to have consumed and be able to recall in my own cadence, the things it created and which I enjoyed.

This is one of those books you want to applaud for its inventiveness, for its atmosphere, for the feeling it evokes, and the ways it presents itself, but unfortunately the style throws all that off - the short, choppy sentences do nothing to draw the reader into the flow of the story, and, in fact, the writing serves to alienate the reader from the characters. I didn’t feel as though I knew any of them any better at the end than I did at the beginning. The lack of interior monologue went from being enigmatic to being annoying pretty quickly. Even the scenes that were meant to be sensual suffered from the lack of flow, the brutish way the words hit, and the seeming disconnect between the characters caused by the overall cold, choppy sentence structure. What could have been a novel that delved into relationships and illuminated real feelings was in reality rather aimless and stark.

I'm very grateful for the opportunity to review this book! Thank you to Europa Editions and Netgalley. The premise of the book entices me, it's similar to what I've read before. Unfortunately, I got around halfway through the book and was not able to finish it. Its writing is curt and difficult to get through. The reader is not given much character development, which could've made the book a bit more captivating. Maybe this book is for someone else, but not for me.

3,5 stars
my first impression of the writing style was not the greatest. i often got confused with the dialogues, as there were no quotation or speech marks. however, the more i got to know the characters, the easier it was to discern who was talking.

really adored the relationship between the housemistress and the narrator : a platonic, yet deep understanding that any gay person w gay friend(s) can relate to.

the rythm was a bit slow so i was having a hard time continuing, but towards the last 70 pages, it got better ;) loved the ending, unexpected but makes so much sense!!!!

ty netgalley for the arc!

A novel of style and, perhaps, a novel of how to stylize a particular kind of butch boyishness that is also (more than) a bit queer. The whole of the novel is in clipped sentences, oftentimes a sentence is a word. Short, to the point, but - it wouldn't be queer if it weren't for poetic flourishes within that clippedness. And from that space of queer butch boyishness come numerous insights into the ways such subjectivity is embodied. For example, "Always an audience to gender. I notice things I want to steal." Or, "Bodies like ours are talked about with vicious glee. Two at once is pure defiance." And, "Oh, summer is embarrassing. Already, it is embarrassing, to be a body on permanent display." Finally, "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." There is also plenty to be said about how such a queer body relates to the heterosexual matrix via eponymous Mrs. S and many other topics regarding relations between sexuality, desire, gender, space, etc. Rich and rewarding reading experience.

'Miss'. That is what the girls of this elite boarding school call her. It fits her as ill as the official title of 'Matron'. 'Mrs. S' is what they term the headmaster's wife and the lovely roll of letters suit her confidence in the space she takes up in this world. These two figures differ so greatly and yet are helplessly borne into the other's orbit, to either shatter against each other or conjoin completely.

This is a book of extraordinary sorrow and delightful beauty. Upon each page is etched such longing that it pierces the reader's heart. Sensual and sexual, this is a novel that awakens the senses with its sublime abundance.

The two women at the centre of it strike such opposing figures and portray stereotypical female roles. Watching their awakening, in the arms of the other, was a beautiful sight to witness. It was, also, always painful; sometimes brutal in its violence and other times agonising in its aching longing. The overflowing emotions ensured this a novel I tore through and one I will also return to, many times.

Oh, goodness. Where do I begin? I loved this novel so much, not just because I'm gay as hell but because, for a debut novel, this blew me away. Consider K. Patrick an instant buy author for me.

Mrs. S follows an unnamed butch narrator, coined "Miss" by the girls she's responsible for looking over at the boarding school where she works, as she enters into a space of infatuation with the headmaster's wife, known only as Mrs. S. This novel is devoid of names—people exist only as their titles, the labels they wear and not the people they are—and is deeply rooted in finding a sense of identity and ownership of self when we are constantly made and remade by the way people perceive us. The relationship that grows between Mrs. S and our narrator is raw and palpable—and hot—but really, at its core, this is a journey is discovery of the self.

I can't wait to purchase a copy of this and destroy it with notes and annotations. This will stay on my bookshelf forever, no doubt about it.

But—but—I will agree with other reviews: the lack of dialogue tags made following the conversations very hard at times. I'd have to reread passages twice, sometimes even three times to figure out who was speaking and when we were shifting into dialogue. Additionally, the ending comes on too suddenly and cheapens the narrative a bit but honestly, that's easy to overlook for the ride that the entire novel is.

I heard really promising early reviews of Mrs. S and was very excited to read it. Unfortunately, I ended up disappointed. This book seems to be attempting to capture the magic of a Virginia Woolf novel, with some modernization in the protagonist's language, but where Woolf shone was in the way every insight, no matter how disjointed, gave the reader a unique perspective on the character's interiority. Even details about the rooms they sat in showed the reader the mind inside. Here, there is an onslaught of exterior details rendered in prose that could be beautiful if it weren't so relentless—every sentence is ruthlessly truncated, as if it is gritted out.

I wish I could love this novel, because its premise has so much potential, but ultimately found Mrs. S to be a disappointment.

This book won't be for everyone. Some won't appreciate what could be perceived as jilted writing, stop-start, no flourishes. However, for me, it's what makes the story work so well. The narrator herself is very contained, uncertain, desperate for what she can't have and never satisfied with what she does. The urgency of youth (because yes, 22 is still VERY much young) is in full effect here, and it really reminded me how all-encompassing love, or what feels like it, can be in that age.

K Patrick has a wonderful ability to make the reader feel as desperate as the protagonist. The first 50% of the book, the tension is so palpable that I wanted to rip my hair out with anticipation. And yet, it was so delicious that I knew I needed to savor it. The "action," when it came, was out of nowhere and all at once and yet perfectly timed and long overdue. Again, very realistic.

Admittedly, I too would have been enamored with Mrs. S at that age. There's something so desirable about that which is just outside of your grasp. Again, K Patrick manages to portray this well. Same goes for the frenetic energy of The Girls at the school, their attention-seeking antics and bored indifference. What seems on the page to be an almost cliche set-up somehow feels entirely different in the author's hands. She managed to give a somewhat tired trope (all girls school = lesbianism!) a completely new and refreshing life.

I suppose the most heartening part of this book was the tenderness with which it's written. The narrator is still so fragile in many ways, still uncertain in her certainty and figuring out how she feels about the ways in which she presents herself. There's no judgment here, nor is there any pressure to explain or justify.

Obviously, I'm gay as hell so this was always going to appeal to me. However, I've read many LGBTQIA+ novels that really sucked (more often than not, in fact) and was pleasantly surprised this one didn't disappoint. It is indeed sensual, as the synopsis promises, but there's more to it than that. You'll have to read it yourself to see what I mean.

Set in an unspecified time (there are no references to the internet or cell phones) in an elite English boarding school for girls, our unnamed Australian narrator, a 22-year-old butch lesbian who just took the job as a "matron", falls for the wife of the headmaster and starts an affair with her. The only person the main character can confide in is her queer mentor, the housemistress. The girls at the school appear as an amorphous, mostly homophobic mass that's frequently up to no good - the protagonist tends to catch them with alcohol, drugs, and involved in other teenage behavior -, so in opposition to other classic or boarding school novels, the personnel of the institution is the main focus, not the kids a.k.a. The Girls (and they are really only referred to as such).

The protagonist is constantly othered, struggles with her queer identity and tries to find her place, and so does the wife of the headmaster - it never becomes entirely clear whether she is bisexual or in the closet. While the novel is marketed as "sensual" and "horny" and the publishers compare this debut to Garth Greenwell, a real master when it comes to writing about sex, I honestly wasn't impressed, because while the parallel to Greenwell actually is that the language is the real star of the text, I, frankly, didn't like K Patrick's short, stark sentences. I see how they have created a particular aesthetic that is all their own, an unruly sound that defies complacent, easy to grasp ideas of beauty, but alas, I didn't enjoy reading it at all. I never got into this text.

I also think that the book is too long for what it has to say, it should have been a novella. And then there's the continued reference to the dead poet who used to attend the boarding school, an Aemilia Lanyer type of character (Lanyer, as the text indicates, did actually work with pathetic fallacies, you can also check out this article that shows parallels between Lanyer and Patrick) - as in some instances regarding this novel, I wondered whether the whole "watch out, I now do literary stuff" plays out here. I just wasn't hooked. Of course, there are also paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe repeatedly mentioned (come on), and there is a staging of La casa de Bernarda Alba / The House of Bernarda Alba, a play in which men are largely absent and that also revolves around an affair.

So all in all, I can admire K Patrick's idea from a theoretical standpoint, but as I found the main device, the language, so off-putting, I'm unfortunately not a fan.

On paper, Mrs. S sounded like it was written to appeal to every single one of my literary interests: queer love story! boarding school setting! exploration of desire!–I was ready to call it a new favourite, and the cover hadn’t even been released yet.

Needless to say, it was a real reality check when I started this book and realized that it was not, in fact, going to be all the things I thought it would be. I’ll cut to the chase: I didn’t really enjoy Mrs. S, and it’s because its writing was…not good.

Mrs. S is a novel that is, at every turn, held back by its choppy, fragmented, stilted writing. The writing simply does not flow, and it actively hinders the reading experience in almost every way. I have nothing against sparse writing; many of my favourite novels–Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, Hot Milk by Deborah Levy–are sparsely written. But Mrs. S is not so much sparse as it is threadbare in its writing–and unbearably so. Unbearable because not only is the writing just not evocative or descriptive in any way–at times it reads like an instruction manual–but on a practical level it gets in the way of the narrative in a way that is almost impossible to overlook. And you’d think that stripped back writing would make for a faster or easier read, but in fact the writing here makes the novel such a slog to read. The reading experience is so stop-and-start, constantly interrupted by the novel’s short, staccato sentences; trying to get through it was like trying to swim and repeatedly having your head dunked in and out of the water. In and out. In and out. In and out.

All the above is made even worse by the fact that the dialogue in this novel a) has no quotation marks, b) has almost no speech tags (“he said” “she said”), and c) has no line breaks. So not only could I not tell who was saying what, I also just couldn’t figure out what was being said. It was so deeply frustrating. I don’t care about the lack of quotation marks, I don’t even care about the lack of speech tags, but no line breaks?? That’s like the bare minimum requirement to distinguish which character is saying what.

When I say a novel is well-written, I don’t just mean that the writing is, on a technical level, good (though that is part of it). What I also mean is that its writing helps it accomplish what it is trying to accomplish: to craft complex characters, or evoke an atmospheric setting, or construct a compelling plot. I didn’t think Mrs. S was well-written, so it’s no surprise that I also thought its story was ineffective. At the heart of this novel is a romance between the main character and Mrs. S, the wife of the boarding school’s headmaster. But here’s the thing: I didn’t buy it. The dynamic between them is written in such an oblique, impressionistic way that it doesn’t really give you a sense of anything of substance. (And the writing’s choppiness makes it so that the novel feels like it’s not really able to sustain anything that feels substantial or fleshed out in the first place.) More than that, the story is poorly paced and often feels aimless. The romance takes a while to get going, and in the meantime we have these boring scenes where the narrator doesn’t really do much of anything. There’s one chapter where she goes to the bar and has some drinks and…that’s it? I struggled to latch on to anything in this novel, and the more I read, the less I found to latch on to.

There is such a huge gap between theory and execution, and though Mrs. S didn’t really give me much to enjoy, it at least gave me an acute awareness of that. In theory, an amazing novel that sounded like it was written for me; in execution, a novel that underwhelmed and frustrated me by turns.

Thank you to Europa Editions for providing me with an eARC of this!