This was brilliant. I love when main characters make strange observations or reveal their truest, weirdest selves to us as readers. It feels as if we’re inhabiting them for a while, experiencing every odd thought and uncomfortable feeling right alongside them. The MC is written almost like an otherworldly being, much like the characters in Yorgos Lanthimos’s films, who behave as if they’re otherworldly themselves, trying to blend into human life. Offseason is a hilarious and introspective debut that reminded me a lot of the works of authors such as Ottessa Moshfegh, Halle Butler and Melissa Broder, especially in the way the characters evolve and deliver their inner monologues. There’s a similar sense of grossness, taboo thoughts, and unfiltered behaviour. It’s awkwardly funny, almost absurdist. Offseason was delightfully unhinged, yet dreamy and thoughtful at the same time. I wholeheartedly enjoyed this and inhaled it in two sittings! I look forward to read more from Avigayl Sharp In the future.

Thanks so much to Astra House for providing my review copy in exchange for an honest review. This is definitely up there in my all-time favourite reads of 2025.

Offseason is one of those rare novels that grabs you instantly and doesn’t let go. I flew through it. Not just because the writing is sharp and propulsive, but because the protagonist is so bizarrely, brilliantly herself.
The story follows a young woman who moves to a small town on the Eastern Seaboard for a short-term teaching job at a private academy. Instead of the fresh start she imagines, the isolation and strangeness of the off-season campus push her deeper into her own obsessive inner world. She fixates on the Holocaust, her family’s knot of trans-generational trauma, Stalin, pedophiles - dark, thorny subjects that in another novel might weigh things down. Here, they become part of a voice so incisive and unexpectedly funny that I found myself laughing out loud at moments that should, by all logic, be grim.
What I loved most is how the book balances emotional discomfort with wicked humor. Her intellectual rabbit holes don’t feel like quirks for color, they’re the exact machinery through which she tries (and often fails) to make sense of her own anxiety, history, and desire. It’s unsettling, illuminating, and deeply human.
The pacing is electric, the voice unforgettable, and the blend of seriousness and comedy is pulled off with a precision that feels effortless. I finished it wishing I could read it again for the first time.
If you like fiction that’s strange, smart, unflinching, and genuinely funny, Offseason is a knockout.
5⭐️
Thanks to NetGalley and Astra House for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I'm a big fan of Avigayl Sharp's short fiction, and was highly anticipating her debut novel—it did not disappoint! In OFFSEASON, an adrift, erudite, young-Stalin-obsessed woman becomes an English teacher at a girl's school in a New England coastal town. PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE-like antics ensue, with a drifting plot with moments of great dialogue and character interactions that reminded me of Joy Williams and Patricia Lockwood. Unlike other books "about" trauma, I think this one had a good take delivered non-ponderously, which is an accomplishment in and of itself. And it's funny!

OFFSEASON has a great voice and sense of humor, my two favorite things a novel can have. I underlined sentences on nearly every page. Ten out of ten stars; will be recommending to friends!

Thanks to Netgalley and Astra House for the ebook. We follow a young woman who gets a last minute gig to teach at an all girls school in New England. In a time where you would never make students read a long novel, she assigns Dicken’s nearly thousand page Bleak House (one student later asks her, Can’t you tell we’re just pretending to have read it?). And then while teaching she constantly talks about pedophiles, the miserable upbringing of Stalin, who is a favorite of hers, and her family’s personal history of the Holocaust. She’s such a fascinating character. She seems to enjoy talking to one of the town’s transients, who never remembers her later, than anyone else. She thinks the teacher she’s replacing for the year may have had an inappropriate relationship with one of the students and then starts an affair with him. She swears she’ll never go home again and then goes home Christmas break and goes out to a bar and starts making out with a childhood acquaintance who she says abused her and ruined her life. It’s not always clear what to believe, but it’s amazing to be in her head as she’s constantly full of praise and apologies to everyone she meets, but so blisteringly mean and inappropriate in her thoughts.

It's hard to believe that “Offseason” is a debut novel. Avigayl Sharp writes with a witty style, a keen sense of observation, and a sharp sense of humor. I am eager to see what this author does next.

In this novel, we follow a young woman to an East Coast all-girls boarding school where she will teach English. Our protagonist is well-educated and aware of social issues, well-being, and more. She seems empathetic and a people-pleaser, and as you read, you gain a better understanding of her mental state and her home and family life. I am a fan of unreliable, messy narrators….

This book explores how we carry past trauma into our daily lives; however, the trauma is not explicitly described. Sharp addresses the topic of trauma with humor and a judgment-free tone, leaning toward hope and caring for the future of everyone featured.

I enjoyed this author's writing style. It was wry and captivating, and just because of her prose, I wanted to pre-order a copy. I would definitely recommend this book to others. Thank you to NetGalley and Astra Books for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

CW rape, pedophilia, genocide, murder, eating disorder, parental neglect, suicide and more are mentioned. Heavy topics, but are not descibed really on the page.

I read Avigayl Sharp's story "Uncontrollable, Irrelevant" in the Paris Review three years ago — I was hooked by the excerpt posted on the Paris Review's Instagram: "I want all their money so I can pursue my dream of being a famous artist, I want to become a famous artist so that everyone will admire, respect, and envy me, I want to admired, respected, and envied so that I can OWN A HOME and AGE GRACEFULLY" (so true) – and I have been waiting for Sharp's debut novel ever since.

Offseason is a VERY funny, deranged, irreverent novel that's outwardly quite similar to Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen: you’ve got an aimless, mentally unwell, sexually repressed young bulimic woman working at a single-sex institution for adolescents and either suspecting or discovering that one of those adolescents is being sexually abused. I think Sharp will definitely appeal to Moshfegh fans but she also def still has her own thing going... unlike Moshfegh she's not afraid to talk about identity and political/social issues, albeit from an ironic remove. It's not easy to write about Trauma when the word/idea has become such a cliche and Sharp does a great job writing about it with both irreverent humor and sincerity.

Offseason by Avigayl Sharp is a smart, darkly funny novel that leans into messiness—in a good way. Told through a sharp, unreliable narrator who’s stuck between past ambition and present reality, the book explores memory, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives. Sharp’s writing is energetic and biting, often laugh-out-loud funny but with real emotional weight underneath. It’s the kind of book that feels bold and a little unhinged, in a way that makes it hard to put down.

This book was All Fours by Miranda July meets The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, perfect for lovers of girl-messes in literature. I really enjoyed this book. It's one that you really have to give your full attention to in order to fully sink into the prose, brilliantly written by Avigayl Sharp. The novel is very humorous in a way where you're not entirely sure if you should be laughing, but the ridiculousness of everything out of the FMC's mouth had me chuckling out loud several times. I especially think Sharp excels at writing when her characters are telling anecdotes to each other- these stories within the main narrative structure are insane and take so many strange turns. I would definitely recommend this to lovers of weird women in fiction.

Offseason won’t be for everyone, but I found the writing and plot to be compelling enough that I flew through this book. I love an unreliable narrator—not one who is unreliable in terms of being able to articulate a sequence of events, but, rather, whose mental stability is questionable (so much the better if the author lets you experience this with such interior specificity that it makes you recognize yourself in the narrator AND question your own stability, or lack thereof). Sharp did this in spades.
Thanks to NetGalley/Astra House for the ARC!

This one took me a minute to get into. It was a dark and cold book to me, but it was also very funny and light at times due to an absolutely chaotic narrator/FMC.

For example, the p*dophile versus ephebophile debates happening in this book alongside late 2025 public discourse around the Epstein Files.

I believe the author missed out on using the all girls school setting more, but that's a me problem. I will anxiously await Sharp's next book.

honestly, i find that a lot of new releases in the literary fiction “depressed weird woman finding herself” genre tend to not have the same subtlety and details that a lot of older releases that defined the genre—that I love—do. this is not the case for Offseason by Avigayl Sharp.
This novel felt new and fresh to me. we follow a 28 year old english teacher at all girls boarding school in a coastal tourist town. set in the fall and winter—the town’s “offseason”—there is a sense of melancholy and unease. the main character’s increasingly concerning quirks and overall sense of apathy mirror the desolation of the town. the unnamed woman is a bad teacher. she only teaches one novel the whole semester, her obsession being Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and goes on rants about her own personal life and trauma. while her methods aren’t exactly scholarly, they do show us how her mind works, as well as the minds of her array of female students. She has a unique relationship with a specific girl in her class who she believes may have been abused in the same ways she had been as a teenager. Her fraught and dare I say toxic relationship with her parents forces her into a state of obsession about mundane things like the history of Joseph Stalin, whereas she seems to procrastinate and repel the things that actually matter the most.

Sharp’s writing is flavourful and sharp (ha ha). Her sentences have a great sense of balance, where she teeters between sentimental and wacky and blunt and sparse. The details used to characterize the town and its people are uniquely real. This was an almost perfect novel for me and I can’t wait to read this author’s next work!

This voice! Less plot than what I tend to go for, but there's something about the narration here (the humor, presumably) that kept me locked in. Was ready to follow this protagonist and her wild opinions/bad decisions anywhere.

This was a wry one.

Reminiscent a bit of For Your Own Good but make it literary this was sharp, and funny, but it was all so subtle. The main character was such a surprise I never knew what she was up to next a this left a bit of befuddlement but in the best way possible.

Sharp’s for a hit debut on her hands and I think we’ve just seen a new literary talent come onto he scene, I think she crafted this book in a clever yet dynamic way leaving interesting takeaways in its wake.

Offseason grabbed me immediately and then kept getting stranger in a way that felt deliberate rather than chaotic. The narrator’s voice is so sharp and compelling at first, but the longer you sit with her, the more the ground shifts beneath you. You start questioning what’s true, what’s performance, and whether you should trust anything she says. It’s less about big twists and more about this slow, creeping psychological unease.

Perfect for fans of weird women in fiction (aka me). 4 stars.

I genuinely loved Offseason, what an amazing debut! I gave it 5 stars, and not in a polite “thank you for the ARC” way — but in a feral, underlined-half-the-book way, seriously. This is not a plot-heavy novel (non-derogatory). I say that to protect this beautiful work from falling into the wrong audience's hands. The momentum comes from the unnamed narrator’s mind rather than from dramatic external events. The story lives almost entirely inside the witty, spiraling, sharp mind of its unnamed narrator — a PhD dropout teaching at an all-girls boarding school.

We never learn her name, which feels deliberate. She exists less as a conventional protagonist and more as a voice: obsessive, curious, contradictory, and hilarious. The novel unfolds through internal monologues and literary tangents — circling a 'misunderstood' young Stalin, Bleak House, her possibly depressed psychiatrist, and her reliance on 'methamphetamine's cousin' to get through the day. The chaos is intentional, and remarkably controlled.

The humor is dark, intellectual, and occasionally uncomfortable. It reminds me of Fleabag in the best way, with its absurdity through razor-edged self-awareness. Beneath that irreverence, though, the prose is genuinely beautiful and immersive.

This book won’t be for everyone, but it was absolutely for me. It feels truly original and wildly entertaining. (And how great is the cover?) This will definitely be a favorite of the year, and I can’t wait to read more from Avigayle Sharp.

Thank you to Astra Publishing House and Avigayle Sharp for my very first ARC!