Female friendship novels are hot right now, but this takes that conceit and turns it on its head, quite tipsily. The characters are the contemporary female equivalent of Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson’s pill-popping, hard-drink, questing bros, but without even the pretense of the quest. They can’t stop themselves from constantly indulging in sex and drugs, but the seduction of the night feels incredibly real in these pages. The subject matter may be the kind of raw, female-fuck-up stuff we longed for in 2015, but what actually makes this novel exceptional is the way it’s written, with a current of pathos and longing buried, but occasionally emergent, under a surface that is scattered with drug paraphernalia and bodily functions.
