– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
Published by Little, Brown and Company on 04 Feb 2020
Goodreads
For weeks, Rachel has been noticing the same golden-haired young man sitting at her Brooklyn bus stop, staring off with a melancholy air. When, one day, she finally musters the courage to introduce herself, the chemistry between them is undeniable: Thomas is wise, witty, handsome, mysterious, clearly a kindred spirit. There’s just one tiny problem: He’s dead.
Stuck in a surreal limbo governed by bureaucracy, Thomas is unable to “cross over” to the afterlife until he completes a 90-day stint on earth, during which time he is forbidden to get involved with a member of the living — lest he incur “regrets.” When Thomas and Rachel break this rule, they unleash a cascade of bizarre, troubling consequences.
Set in the hallucinatory borderland between life and death, The Regrets is a gloriously strange and breathtakingly sexy exploration of love, the cataclysmic power of fantasies, and the painful, exhilarating work of waking up to reality, told with uncommon grace and humor by a visionary artist at the height of her imaginative power.
In a word, this story is: PENETRATING.
This romance was like none I’ve ever read, and it’s not just because I’m unfamiliar with ghost sex! Let me break down two quotes that capture the energy of this book for me:
- “You belong so well in the world. Fucking you would be like fucking the world.” Here, Thomas is commenting on how physically solid Rachel is, ya know, being a living member of the world and all, unlike him. At least that’s what he was commenting on in the first sentence. Then he went there.
- “Death had penetrated me. I had penetrated death.” Here, Rachel is commenting on fucking Thomas. Who is dead.
I don’t know why, but those two quotes are so funny to me! (Hopefully those quotes weren’t spoilers. C’mon, it’s a romance, they were gonna fuck.) Somehow they don’t gross me out. By the time I got this far in the book, I got used to the offbeat dark comedy and, dare I say, took a liking to it. It was jarring at first, and even as I was warming up to the story, I found it strange, absurd, “interestingggg,” but after I finished, the more I thought about it, the more I loved it. It was a grower (like a song! not like…!).
Besides the ghost sex, there are some deeper themes too: relationships, connection, letting go, moving on. I actually found myself relating profoundly to how the characters felt a disconnect from the life happening around them.
I occasionally felt bad about this difference between us—about the way I reliably failed to inhabit a moment, instead hovering outside of it, catlike, waiting to isolate and pounce on a tellable detail.
I can totally see people reading this book and thinking, “What the fuck??” and I can also see people reading this book and thinking it’s absolutely beautiful. As for me, I’m just having a ball. ballz hehe.
(Hi friends! This review was originally posted on my bookstagram and in a monthly reading recap, but I wanted to share it in its own post here so that I could look back on some of my most memorable reads of 2020 more easily. I will be sharing a few more old 2020 reviews throughout the month.)