Emily Vance Brown

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

2/5

I wanted to like Housemates so badly. It was recommended by several people, and it sounds like exactly the type of thing I would usually love. A queer roadtrip? Yes, please! Unfortunately, this book missed the mark for me. 

To start, the narration style was nonsensical, chaotic, and inconsistent. It’s seemingly told by a mythical elder lesbian artist who is sometimes omniscient, sometimes not. If you haven’t read this book and think this sounds cool, I promise, it’s not. It’s incredibly distracting and feels voyeuristic in a deeply unsexy and uncomfortable way—one of the worst narrator choices I have ever come across.

I tend to have a strong personal dislike of books that force a romance where it doesn’t belong, just for the sake of having a romance. I love the idea of a sapphic romance in general, but this was one of the few exceptions where I feel like the story would have been more meaningful if they had stayed friends. Bernie and Leah had no discernible attraction, and the only thing that made it make sense for them to be romantic was the narrator’s assertions that they should be. I felt like the romantic aspect of the story was poorly done, and I would have loved to see some representation of platonic queer friendship and artistic collaboration. 

I was also really perturbed by the author’s portrayal of fatness. It seems like she wanted to demonstrate the fatphobia exhibited by most of society, but instead, it comes across as weirdly fetishistic and over-the-top humiliating. Everything Leah does is topped with the extra commentary of her weight, her size, her body, her clothing. Instead of representing the struggle and discrimination she faces, it makes the reader feel embarrassed of her fatness, which is not how I ever want a work of fiction to make me feel about a fat character, speaking as a fat woman myself. 

I think Eisenberg has a lot of promise, and I’ll still eagerly read her next work because I liked her writing style and the general idea of the novel, but I do wish she’d had a friend or editor sit her down and have a serious conversation with her about this novel before letting it be published.