Relationships | Book Chatter

Big Swiss
By Jen Beagin
Scribner, August 2023, 352 pp.

The Short of It:

What a fun, darkly humorous book.

The Rest of It:

Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house is unrenovated, uninsulated, and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss.

Transcribing sex therapy sessions is already unusual work, but everything shifts the moment Greta recognizes a familiar voice in the park. Standing right in front of her is the woman she has only known through transcripts, the one she has privately dubbed Big Swiss. Seeing her in real life is startling. She is tall, poised, and quietly commanding. Greta realizes she knows intimate details about this woman’s life, yet the urge to know more only deepens.

What begins as curiosity turns into something far more consuming. Greta’s fascination with Big Swiss, whose real name is Flavia, grows intense and increasingly risky. Flavia is married, and Greta is painfully aware of that marriage through the therapy sessions she transcribes. Still, there is an undeniable pull between them. That tension is heightened by the shadow hanging over Flavia’s life, as she is being stalked by the person who once nearly killed her.

As their connection develops into something complicated and unconventional, Greta is forced to confront her own past. She carries deep guilt over her mother’s death, a burden she cannot seem to shake. Meanwhile, life in a small town offers little room for secrets. Everyone is entangled in everyone else’s business, especially when a sex therapist sits at the center, quietly collecting stories and asking probing questions that linger long after the sessions end.

Greta’s job pays the bills, but it also puts her in a morally precarious position. When the boundaries of confidentiality begin to blur, she faces a choice that could unravel everything. Even her eccentric, free-spirited roommate struggles to understand what is at stake.

This novel blends dark humor with an exploration of unconventional relationships. It moves through friendship, obsession, desire, and fear while asking difficult questions. What does it mean to give yourself fully to another person? Is it a loss of self, or a way of becoming whole?

Highly recommended.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links.

Blob: A Love Story
By Maggie Su
Harper, January 2026, 256pp.

The Short of It:

Wild and unbelievable and yet fascinating.

The Rest of It:

Vi has always lived just outside the circle.

At work, she hovers at the edge of conversations. With friends, she’s the afterthought invite. In relationships, she’s the one who tries harder. No matter the room, no matter the people, Vi is always almost in, but not quite.

Then one night, she steps outside her apartment and sees it.

A blob.

Translucent. Gently pulsing. Breathing, somehow, beside the dented trash can. It looks like a jellyfish stranded without water, faintly luminous under the flickering security light. It shouldn’t exist. It definitely shouldn’t be alive.

Vi stares. The blob quivers.

She goes back inside.

But she can’t stop thinking about it.

When she checks again, it’s still there—only now it seems slightly different. Larger?

Against her better judgment—and possibly against all common sense—Vi takes it home.

Recently dumped and painfully untethered, Vi isn’t sure what she has to offer a mysterious gelatinous lifeform. Still, she makes space for it in her tiny apartment. She feeds it. Talks to it. Names it Bob. She teaches Bob how to mimic her—how to stretch, to balance, to grow something resembling limbs.

And Bob learns.

Fast.

Soon Bob the Blob isn’t just pulsing near a storage bin. He’s developing arms. Legs. A torso. A very attractive torso. With each lesson Vi gives him, how to speak, how to move, how to smile, he becomes more human. More independent. More aware.

And harder to control.

Because free will, it turns out, isn’t something you can selectively grant.

As Bob grows into something dazzling and dangerously charismatic, Vi is forced to confront what she’s actually created. Was she trying to build companionship? Control? Someone who wouldn’t leave?

Meanwhile, there’s Rachel. Vi’s relentlessly cheerful coworker. The kind of woman who brings homemade muffins on Mondays and somehow means it when she asks how you’re doing. Rachel is everything Vi isn’t: socially fluent, effortlessly included, suspiciously happy.

Vi doesn’t know whether she wants to be Rachel… or prove she’s fake.

Between managing Bob’s rapid evolution and navigating her own spiraling insecurities, Vi begins to understand something uncomfortable: independence isn’t the same thing as fulfillment. Being alone doesn’t make you strong. Sometimes it just makes you lonely.

Bob may be otherworldly, absurd, even a little ridiculous—but what he ultimately reflects back to Vi is painfully human. We are not built to exist in isolation. We can pretend we don’t need anyone. We can wear independence like armor.

But connection is not weakness.

It’s survival.

Fantastical, sharp, and darkly funny, this story explores loneliness, belonging, and what happens when you try to engineer love instead of risking it.

Recommend but you must go in with an open mind.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links.

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