Book Review: "Take What You Need" by Idra Novey

When I bought this book, it sounded like the kind of book I would definitely get into. Not much happening, long descriptions and intoxicatingly deep conversation. Many of the books I read have a quality of what I like to call 'the deep afternoon' to them. They are almost over-the-top with their spacious, lengthy and intense sensory descriptions of the atmosphere, feelings are washed in tides of metaphors and finally, there is a protagonist that feels so connected with every single sound, smell and sight around them - almost in a detached-from-reality way. Unfortunately, this book had quite a bit of false advertising as it was none of those things and I am still struggling to find the point of it.

First of all, both characters are really unlikeable. Jean is constantly complaining and Leah just seems like some airhead. Jean acts like she's more intellligent than everyone else and Leah is quite possibly one of the dumbest women in modern fiction. The problem I found with Leah's narrative is that there isn't anything to learn or experience when it comes to her. She doesn't have any profound takes on the world, she doesn't feel anything deeply or meaningfully, her husband is some background character the author has used to gain some diversity points and her child is intolerable.

The problem I found with Jean on the other hand was that everything that happened with her seemed a bit too perfectly timed. When she broke up with her husband, she wasn't allowed to see her step-daughter anymore and yet, she seemed to be shocked by that. Within the next few pages, she's met the Elliot guy we keep hearing so much about and it almost seems as if the story is going to have a point before we spend an entire chapter with her mumbling as he takes her to the hospital because she's injured her leg with a grinder.

99% of this novel doesn't really have much of a point and as for the title - I know what it means, but I'm not sure why I care. As the book went on, both characters became more and more insufferable since you feel like calling out to Leah to read a book on just about anything (I mean, by about the middle of the book, nearly all readers can see what the ending is going to be or be somewhere in the ballpark) if she can read that is. You also feel like calling out to Jean to stop being so 'much' all the time. It almost felt like I knew where I wanted the book to go and I knew what I wanted it to do but neither of those things happened.

I bought this book because I had never heard of the author or their work and I very rarely judge an author on one bad novel they have written. I have to say, the concept of the book itself is far better than the book's actual writing, its characters or its events. The concept of the book is just this: when a woman's step-mother dies, she must go back and retrace, finding out hoards about her step-mother that she never knew before. The concept of the book sounds perfect and if it were not for the execution, it probably would have been a better book.

Most of the book is written in a very dry style. It almost feels too modern and it wants to be too blunt. There's no atmosphere, no character development, I don't feel in love with the book or its inhabitants, by the end of the novel I was just left to move on to the next piece of reading. I did not sit there and think about what I had read for the rest of the day because there was nothing to think about. I feel like if the characters were more similar in their personalities that we could possibly see a connection or affiliation between them in the episodic flashbacks, there would have been at least some wiggle room. This book just felt like pages and pages of absolutely nothing.

In conclusion, this is why I am rating the book with such a low score: the characters were a waste of time, the story was underdeveloped, the writing was bad and the book was dull and boring. It had no essence, no flair, nothing to spark discussion or make me think about anything. It just felt like a book of absolutely nothing.

P.S: I would still ask the reader of this article to read the book for themselves and come to their own conclusions. Many people do enjoy this book but many do not as I have seen. This book really just was not for me at all.