PARADISE LOGIC, assured debut of surreal, chaotic young-adulthood's identity crisis

PARADISE LOGIC
SOPHIE KEMP
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time.

It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly.

When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,” Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest.

At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her life: Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world, and announces Sophie Kemp as a wholly original, transformative, and brilliant new voice in fiction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: As an exploration of obsession, of the cultural freight of misogyny and its patriarchal messaging, this story disturbed me. Paradise's obsessions are so spot-on for a twentysomething, all centering external validation for her exterior qualities and ignoring the void where she, herself..her Self...needs to go. She's following the script her gender presentation hands her, beats her with, from birth. Ariel will love her if she's the perfect girlfriend, of course he will.

Never mind he loves his crack habit more than he even notices her. Never mind she only hared off on this quest to become a girlfriend at all because her fuckbuddy Emil plants the idea in her mind..."When I looked down at Emil’s cell phone I would always see a message that said: LOL JUST RIPPED A FAT 1. And then Emil would respond by saying: 'Mashallah, my brother,' even though Sikh is not the same as Muslim and also Emil was a Filipino atheist"...never mind she loves making art and creating zines more than the airhead Ariel the wannabe, but never will be, Assyriologist. She's so open to the world and its experiences that she loses sight of the shore. No wonder this quest results in her downward spiral into weird Stepford-wife trial drugs and enduring sexual abuse.

Surreal, but rooted in a reality I remember all too well, Reality...or Valerie as she was named by her mother...feels like the right narrator to tell me this story of rootless identity and unformed selfhood in a modern context that feels so malign as to make this a horror story. Her blithe breathless narrative voice even feels like that of other twentysomething seekers I've known, mostly female. She is doing what women have had, have been forced, to do for millennia: muddling through, making the best of it.

In many ways a funny and heartfelt account of figuring yourself out, on most others an addled nightmare of not knowing how, when, and where to set boundaries, the real pleasure of this read is its gonzo narrative voice and its relatable struggles toward real selfhood: “You’re making a commitment. A boyfriend I have heard is a lifelong commitment. Once you have one you’re never the same. You become a girlfriend. This is a fixed identity. I didn’t have one of those yet.”

A read for Yuletide's unmoored, unsettled liminal space, to remind older folks of just how hard it is and how easy to make foolish mistakes in that state; how much patience is a gift and how much a con game.

Parents strongly urged to read; and cautioned it won't be comfortable all the time. It will be funny, though.