It felt lucky that she was a young gay woman, only five years older than I was and separated from me by only about a mile. Taut, thorny, and sublimely fraught, Acts of Service stares straight into the white-hot center of desire with a cool, incisive eye.

If the gray areas around sex, power, and consent are difficult for you, then this book will be difficult for you because that is its entire deal. her overintellectualized solipsism is grounded in a class privilege and cultural malaise that both she and Fishman fail to critique . the plot itself is organized chaos: every character is unlikeable and morally gray and toxic in their own way, and every relationship is underlined with degrees of unequal power dynamics and passivity. I found myself constantly convincing myself it was one over the other, thinking I must not be seeing what was hiding in plain sight. Acts of Service doesn’t kiss you first; it gets right to it—depicting the liquid frequencies of need and power with a thoughtful, savage eye.from my perspective, this novel adds nothing to what i do not already know - we find both desire and pleasure in unhealthy relationships and that we do occasionally succumb to gender norms regardless of how headstrong we are.

Another reviewer wrote "For a book about queerness and womanhood, the whole thing is obsessed with men. These scenes were a particular problem for me, not because of their graphic nature, they’re actually pretty tame. on some level i am partly to blame for this negative review (i have read one too many novels about young women involving themselves in relationships with older men and i know they annoy me more often than not) but this one is uniquely bad.the author is queer, the lived experience of queerness is convincing, and drawing more contrasting material from that well might have steered the course away from that fucking clown show of a denouement, if only because it’d mean there were more things to react to in the world. and i'd much rather read a book about someone struggling with same-gender attraction than another woman who has angst over the fact that having sex with men doesn't align with her political views but she wants to do it anyway. A young woman follows her exhibitionist streak to uncharted new territory in this bold and unflinchingly sexy novel, engaging in a three-way sexual relationship that teaches her more than she could have imagined about her own desire. I know I am biased because I am exhausted with so many literary fiction books presenting women who required male validation even if they can't stand them, but I expected this to be a subversion of that where the intersection of desire is also influenced by how people DO feel about women instead of treating the relationships between women as something so simple and so natural that they must not mean as much because somehow, dating men is so, so much harder but also, of course, more rewarding.