Practice

April 15, 2024
A novel about a day in the life of a studious Oxford undergraduate. Annabel rises at the crack of dawn and readies herself to write a paper about Shakespeare's sonnets. As she reads the poems, she recalls the advice of her tutor, a medievalist, to "spend as many hours as [she] could simply sitting with the text....Look away from the text and out the window if you have to, try and pause your mind on the one thing. Focus on the experience of you reading this text now." Brown's gorgeously written debut is a hypnotic meditation on being attentive--on Annabel's attempts to wrestle meaning out of Shakespeare's poetry on this particular day and to establish a strict routine that will elevate her mind above everything else more generally. The only problem is that Annabel is human. She glances out the window and "holy shit"--the world is shrouded in mist and she's pulled away from the sonnets to go for a walk; she must concede to bodily functions; she needs coffee; she's cold or hungry or distracted by the thought of Rich, an older family friend who is pursuing her. In a sneaky way, the novel makes a passionate argument for distraction: While Annabel fanatically tries to discipline herself into being uber-focused, her imagination leads her astray again and again, especially toward figures she's invented, in particular the "SCHOLAR" and the "SEDUCER," two men whose identities she easily slips into and whose homoerotic friendship she spins out in endless variations. Brown's attentiveness to the suppleness of language and the poetry of everyday life makes this slim novel absolutely transporting. In the closing pages, Annabel thinks, "Today has been--" and then she doesn't, and perhaps can't, finish the thought. A brilliant and keen work about being fully alive.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2024
Brown's debut novel takes place during a single day in the life of Annabel, an Oxford University English student who takes her routine and her studies very seriously, as she struggles to write an essay about Shakespeare's sonnets. Brown's curt yet engaging style pulls the reader in and transforms these low stakes into suspense as the deadline approaches, and Annabel is distracted by friends, family, and her much older boyfriend. Each sentence is a taut, considered work of art, and each short section rappels slowly through Annabel's attempts to impose order on her day. Every thought and distraction, whether it's the aggravation of a phone ringing when she needs the bathroom to the more outlandish fantasies she has about two characters of her creation, is carefully described, and the result is hypnotic as the reader is drawn into Annabel's world. Almost Virginia Woolf-like in its focus on the passing of time and somewhat reminiscent of the poetic prose of Eimear McBride (A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, 2014), this novel announces a unique and exciting new talent in British fiction.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 3, 2024
Brown’s sensuous and erudite debut follows a single day in the life of an Oxford student as she brainstorms an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Annabel has yet to decide on her theme, and has risen early to “simply sit” with the text­—as a tutor once advised her to do when faced with an assignment. Despite her desire to focus, she can’t. Instead, she drinks tea, walks in the park, does yoga, and fantasizes about sex. Amid Annabel’s reveries, Brown inserts florid depictions of mundane matters (Annabel “sits on the toilet to piss. Empties herself into calmness”). Low-stakes tension simmers over whether Annabel will allow her older boyfriend to visit her on campus, while news of a friend’s hospitalization for anorexia provokes guilty feelings. When Annabel does turn her mind to the sonnets, Brown’s prose soars (“Could an essay smile with all the smiles she has for the Sonnets: the sad smile of sympathy, the wry smile sharing in his self-mockery... the soft sunlit smile when he offers an image of great beauty”). Lovers of the written word will be impressed. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency.

June 1, 2024

DEBUT Brown's fascinating Joycean debut is a curious and poetic day-in-the-life meditation on meaning and metaphor. In simple and contemplative prose that is almost poetry, Brown ponders the mundane and the metaphorical, the literary and the liminal, the urges of the flesh and the appetites of the intellect. The narrative is told through the voice of a young university student named Annabell who is anxiously intent on writing about Shakespeare's sonnets but unable to get started. The smell of chamomile tea hovers in her small room, snow hovers outside her window, and a need to empty her bladder hovers in the back of her head as she sits at her desk. There are a few phone calls and some fantasies about sex with her "boyfriend," but the truth is Brown's novel is at its best and most delicious when it seems to be about almost nothing at all; in those moments, she seizes something rarely captured in literature--a glimpse of the mind hovering on the edge of inspiration. VERDICT Alive with the spark of a fresh voice discovering itself, Brown's novel is written with astonishing grace and curiosity. This is a work to be compared with Marilynne Robinson's beautiful and boundless Housekeeping, and a writer to be watched with great expectations.--Herman Sutter

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.