All Fours

The graphic content is where readers bail first; one names the exact moment she “lost me at the tampon foreplay and dog shit clean up.” Others reject the narrator outright as self-centered, and a cluster of reviews separate craft from pleasure entirely, one admitting “The writing is incredible and also I hated this book.” The middle stretch drains rather than sustains for several, one calling it “I’m exhausted by this peri-menopausal Odyssey,” and the sex scenes meant to read as candid strike some readers as the opposite instead. A harsher reader dismisses the narrator as “narcissistic, immature and obnoxious.”