Florence in Ecstasy
Jessie Chaffee
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Florence in Ecstasy
Jessie Chaffee
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
...[a] thoughtful, provocative first novel.
Like the appealing anguish of those women's lives, Florence in Ecstasy is a beautiful but exhausting novel. Hannah is perpetually precarious; every accomplishment feels hard-won, and every loss feels inevitable.
[I became] engrossed in its haunting pages.
The prose is both rich and restrained, eschewing the cliché of melodrama.
It’s upsetting to witness her precipitous decline. At the same time, the novel never fully explains how or why the disorder developed; Hannah herself seems mystified by its sudden appearance. Still, since eating disorders usually manifest in adolescence, and not in 20-something adults like Hannah, the story begs for a bit more detail. An enigmatic but engaging debut..