How to Fall Out of Love Madly

March 1, 2022

Cash-strapped Joy and Annie decide to rent their apartment's extra bedroom to charming, older Theo, and Joy and Theo get kind of snuggly close when Annie then decides to move in with her boyfriend. Soon, however, Theo brings in Celine, the gorgeous girlfriend he's neglected to mention, and jealous Joy fails to recognize Celine's own deep pain. Following the attention-getting debut The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky.

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Starred review from June 15, 2022
Three young women come to terms with the roles of the men in their lives and the sad fact that they put them there. "I can't hear them having sex, but I did hear her say one time, 'There's no way I'm doing that.' And I can't help but wonder what it is she doesn't want to do....And if she won't do it, would I? I don't think so, but when she said that I wanted to scream out and say, 'I'll do it!' " This is Joy, who is hopelessly in love with her roommate Theo, who has an exquisitely beautiful girlfriend named Celine who frequently stays over and...yeah. In an even-more-impressive continuation of the work she began with her debut, The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky (2018), Casale has again taken the detritus of women's inner lives--the things we wished had never happened, the thoughts we wished we'd never had, the endless self-flagellation about our bodies--and made something funny, warm, and compelling; something sisterly in the finest sense of the word. Joy and her roommate, Annie, take Theo as a third housemate to help make ends meet, but then Annie's boyfriend, Jason, invites her to move in with him. This would be more of a win if Annie didn't have to manage every single interaction she has with Jason to avoid irritating him, asking something of him, or frightening him off. In one bitterly funny scene, he lights up the whole house with candles in order to tell her he's not ready to get married but someday he will be. Casale's narrative voice is deadpan, funny, and clean without being faux flat or pretentious. She controls the narrative not seamlessly but with interesting flexes of the storytelling muscle. Sometimes she tells you what's going on from a God's-eye view. "This is where Joy could have spared herself." "Here was where so much came together for Annie." Other times she lets us directly into the women's internal monologues, with first-person sections. The most fascinating of these belongs to Celine, a person who has to live with being so attractive that it's all anyone can ever think about. Casale is an American Sally Rooney, so smart about friendship and love.

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September 2, 2022
Best friends Annie and Joy were fooling themselves that they could split the rent two ways on their three-bedroom place. Theo responds to their ad for a roommate, and Joy's heart responds to Theo, instantly and deeply. The triangle at the heart of Casale's second novel, though, trades Theo for his girlfriend, Celine, who shares narrating duties with Joy and Annie. After high-powered Annie moves in with her boyfriend, whom even she, on some level, knows is utterly disappointing, sweetheart Joy finds, well, joy in taking care of Theo like a wife (or a mother?) would, going so far as to wash his dirty underwear even as his relationship grows with the gorgeous and aloof Celine, who is also, surprise, privately struggling with being her exact, excruciating self. As in her intimate and astute debut, The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky (2018), Casale illuminates her protagonists' inner worlds with a nearly alarming authenticity. These cis, straight women know both who they are and how to perform the women men want them to be; they've been on both ends of life's most sensitive questions and know that a kind response and an honest one aren't usually the same thing. Many readers will feel seen. Plot is subtle here, and far from this book's draw. It's the excitingly, exhilaratingly tiny and true movements of these women's hearts and minds that will move How to Fall Out of Love Madly solidly into readers' own.

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