Even though he saw. He saw who I am, he loved me immediately, he understood everything. He knows I understand too. I hate him for knowing we both understand, yet still letting me go. How dare he not call me this morning-he can easily get my number-leaving me on my own with the weight of our meeting. Is he thinking about all this? Does he even remember? Of course he does. My entire existence is reduced to the need for being the object of his desire, and all other components of life become redundant.
Somewhere between romance and fiction lies Maya Kessler’s debut Rosenfeld.
Noa Simon is a thirty-six-year-old filmmaker who knows what she wants when she sees it, and when she meets Teddy Rosenfeld, an antagonistic, older CEO, she goes for the jugular. An electrifying encounter in a bathroom stall after their first meeting only serves to whet Noa’s appetite, and despite Teddy’s subsequent rejections, she is exhilarated by the challenge—and by her own insatiability. In her first power play, she takes a job at his office, setting up a battle of the wills that Teddy proves unable to resist. Their ravenous, volatile romance will ultimately unearth difficult secrets from both of their pasts, and finally force Noa to reckon with her deepest desires and most destructive impulses. Written with visceral intensity and voyeuristic precision, Rosenfeld is a propulsive tale of sexual abandon that titillates and interrogates in equal measure.
This book was my most anticipated read for November. It just sounded so different than a lot of what we get in the romance genre and I was ready for a break. I wasn’t wrong. Rosenfeld is not your typical romance. In fact, I’m not sure I would agree that this book fits into the romance genre at all. I’d put it more firmly in fiction territory.
The first chapter, I was enthralled. It really is just so different. I had the same sense when I read You Make a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi. That sense that this is something totally raw. That’s where the similarity ends however. I did not end up loving Rosenfeld nearly as much.
Noa is an interesting character. Selfish, emotionally immature and frankly, insufferable. Teddy is much the same, albeit, much older and richer than Noa. I don’t always have to love the main characters, but I do prefer to root for one of them, or at the very least, have some empathy or understanding of them. That was not the case here. Noa and Teddy have an intense relationship that doesn’t make a lot of sense. They hurt each other repeatedly. There is an obsessive quality about them.
My biggest beef with this book is the length. It’s like a song with one chord that repeats for too long. No chorus, no changing it up. There is very little that happens until about 3/4 of the way through, and even then, the character growth seems minimal to me. By then I disliked both characters so strongly, I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for their “growth”. This would have been much more compelling as a short story that left us wanting more.
Even with all that said, I am going to be watching Maya’s career as I think she has an interesting voice and I’d like to see what she does with it.
Thank you, Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster for the copy in exchange for an honest review.
