A review by lezreadalot
Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg

4.0

I’d like to borrow from you those miles you’ve seen and wear them in my own untraveled shoes. I’d like to treat your feet with slow and ready fingers, and bring you, unshod, to bliss.

4.5 stars. This is the kind of litfic I could thrive on. Slightly pretentious writing, but so beautiful and meaningful that I don't mind, and a plot that's more of a slice of life than anything else, capturing several gorgeous, tumultuous months in these two women's lives. We're following an undergrad and grad student at a college in the late 90s/2000s. It's important to go into it knowing that you're getting a love story and not a romance, and once you have that awareness you can bask in everything else about the book. Primarily the writing. I was never quite this flavour of lit student, but I still do love reading about people who love reading, people who write, people who steep themselves in poetry, and so it makes sense that the writing is lyrical and sweet, even amidst the bitter-sweetness and heartbreak. There are moments when the perspective breaks away into bits of omniscience, gives us a line from the future, or a glimpse of Anne's expressions when Flannery isn't looking, and I ended up loving those. I can get behind omniscient POV as a periodic, stylistic choice.

Those uncounted hours alone in her sleepless room had taught Flannery something, after all. That, in love, she could face illumination.

Listened to the audiobook as read by Abby Craden, who gives this all the intensity and gravitas but also loveliness it deserves. Because this really was lovely, even though we know what's coming, what this is and what it can't be. There are some lines surrounding their romance and what they mean to each other that were so deeply cutting, and effective, and beautiful. Again, the writing is really where this shines, but I did love the characters as well. Flannery was so masterfully written, and I love this as a coming of age story, that is about love at first sight, infatuation, sexuality, but also deals deeply, meaningfully, with love. I know that there's a second book but idk if I'll ever actually read it. I kind of like where this one leaves us.

Content warnings:

Spoiler

underage? Flannery is 17 for half the book

So alive are these narratives on your wantable mouth and in your essential eyes that I can watch them, movies in my quiet head to play when I’m at home, stirring in my empty rooms, waiting for my own ship to come in.