A review by meredithw20
The Clasp by Sloane Crosley

4.0

This was my first experience with Sloane Crosley, though I reserved her memoir at the library before I reserved The Clasp... but I guess the length of those respective lines is telling? I dunno. I liked this book, despite stated objections to many of its elements in the abstract -- like I sort of roll my eyes when a work of modern fiction is presided over by the characters' obsession/intersection with a classic author, the way Whitman holds court in Paper Towns, but for whatever reason the Maupassant thing read as charming. I don't like stories where men have conflicting attractions to one woman (and I guess that's still true of The Clasp, because I didn't dig the way this ends). I am really done with mopey techie boys as book characters, but I followed Victor across the ocean. I was compelled to read this pretty quickly, despite a relatively low-stakes plot and characters I found irritating, I guess because their motivations had such a strange twist in application? Or because I liked the language so much? God, I have never written this long a Goodreads review. tl;dr: I don't know why I liked this book so much. Maybe you can tell me.