Sometimes, we read a book that shifts time. That changes us. That opens a chasm through which we can measure a "before" & an "after." Mrs. S, the debut novel from K Patrick, is one such book.

The book follows an unnamed narrator, the new matron at an all-girls school (who the students, The Girls as they are called, only refer to as Miss), as she navigates her new position, her desire to see & be seen, & her infatuation and eventual love affair with the headmaster's wife, the titular Mrs. S. From page one, I was pulled into the narrator's voice, like a leaf drifting down a current. With its short, staccato-like syntax, & poetic turns of imagery & metaphor, K Patrick's prose is nothing short of revolutionary. Each moment is entirely present, fully embodied in the text. Every anxious thought, moment of second-guessing, deciphering of body language is something we experience alongside the narrator. There is a radical sort of honesty to the text & the way we move through the narrator's discovery of herself & her desires.

I was struck by the narrator's sense of difference, as she searches to know herself, while I was also reminded that only one letter separates her (Miss) from the object of her desires (Mrs. S). On the level of desire, they may not be so different after all. But it is always difference that separates.

This novel is horny. Queer. Erotic. Lesbian. Butch. You can feel it in the fabric of the language, in the way descriptions drip with desire. I couldn't help but think of Barthes' A Lover's Discourse. There are sensual repetitions of mouths, hands, & water imagery. But it is also full of moments of queer discovery & community. Some of my favorite scenes are those between the narrator & the Housemistress, another lesbian working at the school who takes the narrator under her wing.

There is only a version of myself I know after reading Mrs. S. I have been seen. I have been written into the record. This is not to say that my own experience is directly akin to that of the narrator here. But the honesty, the complicated intertwining of desire & transformation laid bare, that is what has left me changed.

Thanks NetGalley for the eARC. Buy this book!

Some quotes I loved (and highlighted once I picked up a physical copy of the book):

"I float. If I could choose a different chest I would choose this water. If I could choose a different body I would choose this water."

"Forever in love with the word. Lesbian. The slow sexuality of it, a snake in the mouth."

"Estuaries of neon veins, knuckles rising like moons. Nails short, a practical choice, although this too I happily convert into concealed lesbianism. Everything is a sign."

"This is what it is to be wanted. Loving her will be impossible. There is nothing I can do to stop it."

"The most painful desire of all, surely, to want somebody to be moved, to want to be so significant."

"To talk it through, to use language as it is already known, requires how I feel to be a fixed state. It isn't. A self always on the move."

I set out to read a book by every writer on Granta’s influential list of the best British novelists under 40. This extraordinary debut has already made it worthwhile.

This is a novel about queer desire, so what better setting than a girl’s boarding school. But it isn’t jolly hockey sticks and schoolgirl romance. The protagonist is a young Australian, temporarily employed as a matron and the object of her lust is the Headmaster’s wife, Mrs S. The narrator is a person out of place. She has no time for the traditions of this institution, the annual fell run, or the veneration of the famed alumnus, The Dead Author.

The time in which the novel is set isn’t made clear but is seemingly the early 90s. The language used to in relation to the narrator’s queerness reflects that. She is referred to and refers to herself as a lesbian. She doesn’t object to the use of female pronouns, which I’m reflecting in my language, though it’s telling that I’m feeling uncomfortable doing so. I have to wonder whether the character would describe themselves as trans were the story set now. She binds her chest and envies male bodies. When she goes swimming she wears a t-shirt and not the swimming costume she has forgotten how to wear. In a crucial scene she is asked about the binder and struggles to explain that it is about masculinity rather than being ‘like a man’:

‘She needs more detail. I don’t know, I never know, how to provide It. To talk it through, to use language as it is already known, requires how I feel to be a fixed state. It isn’t. A self always on the move. I give in to a simplicity I don’t believe in. I guess, yeh, it lets me feel more manly.’

I’ve read that Patrick K wanted to write a “horny novel”. Mission accomplished. The novel is sensual and at time so frankly erotic that this reader felt quite flustered. The writing is intense, with short, fragmentary sentences in long, breathless paragraphs. It seems that the writing has proved a barrier for some people, based on some other reviews. But for me it was powerful, atmospheric and beautifully written.

One of the best books I’ve read this year.

Mrs S is an intoxicating and slightly obsessive sapphic romance set against the backdrop of an all-girls boarding school. It's a largely introspective novel that primarily takes you inside the minds of our main character and narrator known only as Miss, a newly employed matron, who rapidly develops a more than platonic interest in the headmaster's wife, Mrs S. This will be somewhat relatable to every one of us to varying degrees as I feel we have all felt infatuation with a new lover or love interest before, just not at quite this extreme. I often feel stylistic choices in prose can make or break a book, and this is no different.

I thought the decision to refer to only one character by their actual name or at least initial (Mrs S) and the rest of the cast by their role only was inspired; this helps create the stifling claustrophobic feeling that the dynamic/relationship between Mrs S and Miss is the only thing that matters, the focal point, and pulls you into their world; a world set apart from others. Patrick also purposefully fails to utilise any marks that indicate dialogue which makes careful reading necessary, especially initially, and will not appeal to everyone, but I didn't find it as troublesome as I thought I might.

There is also very little use of expected punctuation and no paragraph breaks. This is a compelling and emotionally resonant gay love story ideal for Pride month that highlights the taboo nature of lesbian relationships even at this time and not only the pressure they were under to keep their love affair secret for the sake of Mrs S and her marriage, their job security and especially keeping the rumours and remnants of a gay relationship from doing the rounds at the boarding school, but also the endless drama and tension that came from keeping such a large secret while sneaking around and seeking stolen moments with each other behind the backs of their colleagues.

It's full of suspenseful scenes and the pages simply ooze sex, temptation and longing despite this not being something I would usually enjoy in a book. It's done so well and the ever-increasing danger of being discovered is impossible to ignore. This is an incisive and nuanced inner monologue with many tender and moving moments and encapsulating the complexities of gender identity, female desire, social standing/positions of power and the stark differences/duplicitousness between our public and private faces.

Mrs. S by K Patrick really was such a sublime and sensual read. I really enjoyed every part of this book. I especially loved the queer representation.

Happy to highlight this new release in “Loud & Proud,” a round-up of new and notable reads for Pride Month, in the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

a book so moving that it got me over my phobia of authors not using quotation marks!! huge

wow what an amazing book - i really wasn't expecting to fall in love with this like I did. The first 10 pages really challenged me with the form; no quotation marks or paragraph breaks with the dialogue, very stream of consciousness which are usual deterrents for me. once I got accustomed to the style, I actually really liked the format. It was more playful and unique than most books, some paragraphs feeling more like poetry.

obviously I loved the sweeping romance - the lesbian pining, the torrid affair, the age gap, the forbidden romance (all my favorite qualities in a sapphic romance novel, sue me) but I also just really adored the protagonist. I loved the way they thought about the world. I loved how despite the insecurities of moving through the world as a lesbian and a butch one at that, they loved being a lesbian. I often find in sapphic lit, the word lesbian isn't often used. It's subbed out for words such as queer, sapphic, "I don't really like labels" and i found this novel so refreshing in the way it reveled in the word. I don't think I've read a lesbian fic book with a protagonist like this; showing the spectrum of how you can be a lesbian (the protag doesn't really use the words "trans" or "non-binary" but wears a binder and finds themselves outside of the gender binary and is figuring out what that means to them).

the part that brought me to tears while reading this was the friendship between the protag. and the Headmistress. Unabashed lesbian friendship and love. The way the Headmistress really opened our main character's eyes to what platonic lesbian love can be and how they can open their hearts to being loved. Ugh i could cry again.

One of my favorite reads of the year.

I liked, did not love this one. Thematically and atmospherically it’s very compelling: a story about queer desire and isolation set at an English all-girls’ boarding school, probably in the 90s though it’s never made explicit. Our protagonist, a 22-year-old butch lesbian who has moved from Australia to serve as the Matron, is cut off from everything that isn’t the school, and in this stultifying, stale atmosphere, she cultivates an obsession with the headmaster’s wife. She struggles to establish authority over the girls and feels alienated by the girlish rituals that, not so long ago, made her a teenage outsider. I didn’t love the writing itself - though there were some infrequent lovely moments - and I think it should have been shorter. There’s a sense of creeping tension that would have been more effective as a novella, and the ending is so abrupt that it feels tacked on to a book that often takes its time getting anywhere. Parts of it are repetitive, but not repetitive enough to feel like a deliberate literary device. Ultimately, I wanted this to feel more obsessive and claustrophobic than it did. I think it’s a promising debut from K. Patrick, and I’ll keep my eye out on what they do next.

Thank you to NetGalley and Europa Editions for the eARC of <i>Mrs. S</i>. All opinions are my own.

There's a line in <i>Lolita</i> where the narrator says of Lolita, the object of his obsession, that she was "safely solipsized." I kind of feel like I am, too, after reading K Patrick's debut novel <i>Mrs. S</i>. In this interior storytelling, the reader is a helpless victim to the unnamed narrator's perspective. Every single thing except Mr. and Mrs. S, the headmaster and headmaster's wife of an elite girl's English boarding school, go unnamed. There's "the Girls," "the Headmistress," "the Nurse," and, her ghost ever-looming over everyone, "the dead author," a famous alumna of the school. What we do know—the narrator is a woman uncomfortable with her assigned-at-birth gender, Australian, young, and gay—is given to us in dribs and drabs, since we are bounced around the narrator's brain like a pinball for most of the novel, on board for the tumultuous ride of her emotions, self-talk, and view of the unfamiliar world around her.

The story is luscious, sensuous, and claustrophobic. The narrator fixates on the named Mrs. S, the headmaster's wife who has also taken a keen interest in her. The two grow closer, and as they do, the narrator grows nearly obsessive.

The prose is beautiful, but as beautiful as it is, this book was challenging to read. Not only is everyone generically unnamed, but there are no quotation marks or dialogue markers—the reader must pay absolute attention to context and infer when the speaker has changed, who says what, just another way that we are sucked into the interior world of the narrator.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It was drenched in sexuality and sex, passion and attraction. Just be ready to read it when you're not half-asleep, because otherwise you'll probably miss half of what is going on.

This book was so delicious and is sure to be a queer classic!! Thank you, @europaeditions and @netgalley for the advanced reader copy!

The first thing I’ll say about this book is that I was captivated by the narrator's voice, and the writing style immediately pulled me into the day-to-day life of our narrator. The story is essentially about the headmistress of a boarding school and the evolving relationship and shared yearning between her and a recently hired “matron.” Readers only ever hear from the unnamed young matron, who is our narrator and yet Patrick still managed to introduce so many interesting and developed characters with very focused descriptions. Much of the writing was also bold and erotic without being overly descriptive, which is such a skilled form of writing.

Patrick obviously understands what it means to exist in the world while queer and the portrayal of the characters reflect that from the tiniest details to the larger ones. The narrator not only has a fixation with the headmistress, who becomes her lover but also with her husband (the school headmaster). Constant comparisons are made by the narrator between herself and the headmaster, and the detailed observations that the narrator makes about male characters, reflect a seeming jealousy not only of their appearance, although that is undoubtedly part of it, but also of how they move around in the world.

It was difficult to decipher which decade this book was set in, although there were mentions of it being after a war. There also was no specific plot event that marked a turning point for the characters. Instead, there were several smaller events involving the students at the school that were dealt with by the faculty.

One big reason I think that everyone will not enjoy this book is due to the lack of quotation marks used when someone is speaking, in a very James Joyce/Sally Rooney type of way, but it did feel like a very intentional decision.

Ultimately, I think Patrick is a really skilled writer, and I would love to read anything else they put out. Patrick captured queer longing, attraction, intimacy and tension and queer friendships so masterfully. I recommend!

DNF at 33%. This one had so many ingredients that I usually love — queer representation, romance, dark academia vibes. But unfortunately it didn’t quite work for me. The prose was very stream of consciousness, with no quotation marks or even line breaks in conversations. I found this a bit challenging to follow at times. That said, I can see why this book is getting so much attention, and I think it’ll be a great fit for a lot of readers who are up for this style of writing! I hope to give it another try, perhaps when I’m in a different headspace.

Big thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. It’s out very soon, so check it out at your local library or indie!

Mrs. S is a gorgeously written, stylistically experimental, slow-burn exploration of queer attraction, gender, and coming of age. Our narrator is in her 20s, teaches at an all-girl's boarding school, a transplant from Australia and quite openly a lesbian. She befriends the housemistress as someone with shared queer experience, and falls into an illicit affair with the headmaster's wife -- Mrs. S.

There are interesting stylistic choices from the way no one is really given a name beyond their titles, the students are ambiguously a single unit of "The Girls" and sort of blend with each other as characters. The book does not utilize any quotation marks in a very and there's not even paragraphs between the dialogue. So the whole work and conversations blend together and can become very confusing on who is saying what, what is being thought versus spoken, etc.

The writing feels a bit pretentious in a way that even while I could enjoy it, stylistically got a bit frustrating at times and it definitely isn't for everyone. The work has hints of quiet humor and reflective observation of the heteronormative society that exists around our narrator and how it can stifle younger generations.

Overall, Mrs. S is stream-of-conciousness in its text and beautifully woven with producing feelings of queer yearning. The dynamics and characters are fleshed out and none of the relationships are quite so simple. It is a text one needs to sit with, and while I wish I enjoyed it more than I did, there's a lot of value in what is being explored. The book simply captures the mundane nature of life and the mess of identity.

The unconventional writing style juxtaposed with the familiar feelings of queer longing and desire play out beautifully in Mrs S. Fans if sapphic fiction get ready to enjoy!

A butch outsider from Australia takes the job as “matron” at an all-girls’ boarding school. Though an outsider, she finds friendship with one of the housemistresses and falls head over heels in love with the headmaster’s wife, Mrs. S. Throughout her time there, the two embark on a slow-burning, elicit affair that leaves the main character into a coming-of-age journey in her twenties.

All I needed to hear about this one was boarding school, lesbians, and adults. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a queer YA set at a boarding school any day of the week, but it’s a nice break to have the adults do the romance thing every now and again as well. It was a little harsher than I expected, more brutal and somewhat honest about the nature of affairs and relationships rather than romantic and hopeful. Dramatic, for sure, it’s a slow burn of a book, not just the romance, but the whole thing unfolds slowly from the main character’s point of view. From the rush of first kisses to the crushing reality of affairs with married women. I recommend, but not if you’re looking for a typical, queer romance.

I’m writing this, looking over the passages I saved when reading through the novel for the first time, I am legitimately almost overwhelmed; this is writing of an extraordinary caliber, writing I am actively astonished by.

The unnamed narrator of Mrs S., K Patrick’s stunning debut novel, is a young person from Australia, spending a year abroad, chaperoning at a historic boarding school for girls (who are called always the Girls, and never identified individually by name). It’s here that the narrator falls for the headmaster’s wife, the titular Mrs S., a paragon of feminine beauty; a beautifully-paced slow-burn affair follows. It can still feel shocking to me when a novel so invested in interiority and psychological portraiture is as deftly plotted as Patrick’s debut; sometimes when we talk about writing, I think externality and interiority are pitted against one another, like it’s possible only to have or focus on one of the two, when the best writers—and K Patrick is an incredible writer—show that this is an arbitrary, borderline meaningless categorical distinction when talking about the possibilities of fiction.

Patrick’s narrator is an outsider whose life beyond the story is largely unknown to the reader, and the beauty of this is that the interior life of the character is so vividly painted that what little background is given feels more than sufficient. We know they are in their early twenties; we know they have somewhat recently broken up with an ex; we know they have a poor relationship with their father. Much else of the biography is obscured. But in its place there are passages that cut deep into the heart of who the character is, such as this one, as the narrator looks into the mirror: “[...] something else has happened to my eyes. They can no longer be placed. The colour a light brown, some depth, then a limit. People mistake me for cold. I don’t know what it means when it is said to me, to be cold. That I am not able to be immediately understood, to be read one way or another.”
And this interiority is grounded in a deep understanding of writing about bodies, of writing about the body in space. Patrick is particularly attentive to body language and subtext. A short description that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “Beside me Mrs. S shifts, places her hands between the small of her back and the wall.” It’s so simple, and the type of movement I recognize both seen it and made it often myself, but I can’t think of any other time I’ve read a description of that body language in fiction. The narrator’s hyperawareness of these things is a phenomenal embodiment, or playing out, of Roland Barthes’s comment in A Lover’s Discourse: “This is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.”
Much of the novel is concerned with this kind of careful observation, the attempt to sort out projection from signals. The Girls seem to be a kind of mirror through which the narrator can see signs of their own desire and fear of transparency. After Mrs S. shows the Girls how to better handle a paintbrush, they “[...] examine their own knuckles. Subtly, or at least what they think is subtle, tightening and loosening their hands around their paintbrushes.” The Girls are always casting sidelong glances, modulating their bodies to match interactions, grasping at approval: notably, the Girls, too, crave the seemingly holy rays of Mrs S.’s attention. The fact of both the narrator and the Girls attending so carefully to their own behavior around Mrs S. seems to be a statement about her authority; it seems to me that this kind of self-regulation on the part of the narrator, even as a fellow faculty member, is an explicit result of the power and age differential between Mrs S. and themself.

The style is a serious achievement: here is prose deserving of the oft-cited adjective “taut”; Patrick writes mostly in short, tense sentences, and these are punctuated by the diction of high lyricism, by figurative language, creating vivid points of contact with (often the physical, natural) world. And then Patrick is playful with syntax in a way that feels true to speech and thought. All of this serves the most gripping aspect of the novel, for me, which is its portrait of a complex subjectivity, of someone very self-conscious and struggling with the reality of performativity across multiple spheres.
It’s clear that the narrator feels uncomfortable with traditional femininity but doesn’t seek an entirely masculine identity, either, instead feeling out a middle ground, though where exactly it lies is never addressed with a label, something I appreciate and am excited by. A crucial moment in the novel is a conversation where Mrs S tries to sound the narrator’s relationship to gender, why it is that they wear a binder. “She needs more detail,” the narrator thinks. “I don’t know, I never know, how to provide It. To talk it through, to use language as it is already known, requires how I feel to be a fixed state. It isn’t. A self always on the move.”

At its heart there’s a struggle here between solidity with its defined boundaries, and fluidity with its permeable ones; Mrs S. with her vicarage, her husband, her position in the school and community, her life calcified around her, and the narrator, still young, with their necessarily transient position, on visa in another country, life still flexible. Perhaps this defiance of stasis is the most moving thing about the novel. “I am changing,” the narrator says at the novel’s end, “I have always been changing.”

Mrs. S is a hard book to describe. It’s about an Australian butch lesbian taking the job of Matron at an English boarding school and falling for the headmaster’s wife, but that seems somehow like it’s removing half of its depth. At the same time, though, what more can I say about it? It’s one that you have to read to fully get.

The writing style in this is something between stream of consciousness and a more regular style and it takes a little getting used to, not least because speech is neither marked with quotation marks nor a new line. On occasion, that makes it hard to tell who is saying what, but surprisingly still not as much as you might expect.

It also makes it quite easy to find yourself absorbed by this book. It’s set during a hot summer and that headiness makes its way off the page to the reader. It feels as though you’re reading this on a hot summer day, regardless of when you’re actually reading it. And the desire too, of our narrator for Mrs. S, of the Housemistress for something more, all of that is equally real to the reader. No matter that these people don’t get given names really, that the schoolchildren are only ever The Girls, you can feel everything about them so vividly at times.

However, and this is going to sound completely at odds with what I’ve just said, there’s still a sense of being held at arm’s length from everyone. Perhaps this too ties to the lack of names. The narrator is obviously the most fleshed out of the characters, since it’s in her POV, and it makes sense that Mrs. S seems more dreamlike to her, unknowable, because that’s part of her appeal. But I found myself wanting to know a bit more about the other characters, about the Housemistress in particular, and The Girls. The latter definitely felt like one big indiscernible mess, which was probably intentional but I’m not sure if it worked.

In the end, then, this was merely a 3 star read for me. Good, but never something I felt amazed by. An enjoyable use of time, but sadly not much more.

Thank you netgalley for the arc of this book! In theory, I would have loved this. And truth is, I still might. Once it is released I will definitely attempt this again. However, where this lacked for me was its formation, and lack of editing. It made the overall reading experience quite difficult. There is potential here, again, I will check this out after it’s release, but I DNF’d at 15%.

The book's writing is not going to be for everyone, and I seemed to have fallen onto the side where the writing style didn't fit my personal taste. However, that didn't stop me from liking the plot. The plot was intriguing, and the tension between the characters kept me invested in the story. The lack of quotation marks in the arc made it confusing to follow along with who was speaking and where they were. There was some stylistic things within the novel that didn't make much sense to me such as the quotation marks or some of the prose which hindered my liking for the novel as a whole.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Mrs. S is, in my opinion (grain of salt there friends), such a needed, almost groundbreaking queer novel. Queer folks also deserve vaguely British romance novels wherein next to nothing happens for hundreds of pages, and I mean that sincerely.

Starting off, the formatting of the dialogue was strange for me to get accustomed to, but I picked up on it quickly enough, and I think it forced me to read the dialogue as if it were happening in my mind’s eye — I needed to picture the characters speaking, and it gave it more weight for me. That one road bump aside, I adored this novel. It was sweet and witty and beautifully written, and felt like a quiet observance of queerness that I rarely see. There are so many things I want to say about this novel, and yet they feel trapped in my chest as I try to express its brilliance.

Just read it. I’ll likely recommend it to you if you ever ask, but take this as me saying it too. It was stunning, and is well worth your time.

Gorgeous, breathtaking, and unnerving. People are going to call this novel "understated" but they're mistaken. Rather than being understated it is a story of tremendously powerful, and yet nearly entirely suppressed desire. Not just desire for sex, but also desire for so many other things. Desire for human connection. Desire to be understood. Desire to be loved. And most of all: desire to understand oneself. It's a novel about a person trying to define her identity in a time when the words have yet to be invented. If the novel had been sent in contemporary times then the protagonist might have been comfortable reaching for words like "trans" or "trans-masc" or "nonbinary" to describe herself. Although in a way these words might have flattened the uniqueness of this protagonist, who is still searching for how to be in the world. The novel seems to hover in a time period when transness isn't yet definable or knowable or in the air as a concept, even--the early sixties, maybe--and it's almost as if this protagonist is paradoxically freed from the need to label herself, or to bow to the limitations of any given word.

She loves the word "lesbian," though. She loves the sound of the word itself, even as she is exploring a way to express an identity that encompasses a gender beyond a capital F.

The scene in which her lover asks her why she wears a binder is so good for how it captures how hard it is to define, and to explain to someone who hasn't yet thought past a gender binary--even if she is your lover--what it's like to have a body and a self that don't fit into the old paradigms.

<It's hard to explain. Please try, do try. I use it to flatten my chest...Flatten it? Yes. What, so, to be more like a man Here is another word that doesn't work. Man. I don't know if it's 'like a man,' it's more about masculinity. Same thing. I don't think it is.</I>

Well I'm absolutely bowled over, by the beauty of the language, by the subtlety of the relationships and how they unfold, and by the way K Patrick just lets this story be and lets it breathe on the page without feeling the need to sensationalize any part of it. This is a very human story.

This book was everything to me. Young transmasc working at an elite English boarding school embarks on a love affair with the headmaster's high femme wife. The sexual tension. The queer yearning. The masc/ femme dynamics. Some of the best sex scenes I've ever read. Although I read this in two days, I kept having to get up and take breaks to cool off lol. The tension between how the two of them view queerness was complex and painful. The ending was beautiful. The only reason I gave it four stars instead of five was that the broken sentences and lack of quotation marks didn't really work for me. After reading it for a bit, I was able to get into it enough so that those two stylistic choices didn't ruin my experience, but it was sometimes difficult to follow who was speaking. I'm sure there was a reason the author made these choices, but they didn't work for me as a reader. Overall though, this is one of my favorite reads of the year so far, and I will be pre-ordering immediately. I love mascs, and I love lesbians. <3

Thank you Europa Editions and NetGalley for the ARC.