Peach

Starred review from October 30, 2017
Glass’s fierce and mesmerizing debut straddles the line between fable and novel as it chronicles the effects of a sexual assault on a young woman by a depraved stranger named Lincoln. The book opens with teenage Peach walking home after the attack, battered and bruised. The lingering smells, sounds, and taste of the event are evoked in vivid detail: “charcoal breath,” “burnt flesh,” “crack crackly crackling” blood. Peach tells no one about what happened to her—neither her boyfriend, Green, nor her oversexed parents—and instead stitches her wounds up in the bath using a thread and sewing needle. In subsequent days, nightmares, hallucinations, and fear creep in alongside the evocative scent of roasting sausage and eerie sightings of Lincoln lurking in the woods near Peach’s school. Peach relishes the comfort of Green’s generous embrace while trying to ignore the psychological, emotional, and physical changes roiling within her. These surprisingly tender moments between Green and Peach offer respite from an otherwise challenging story as it leads up to its unforgettable twist ending. Making full use of metaphor, alliteration, and wordplay, Glass’s remarkable prose stretches the boundaries of storytelling throughout, adding depth and strange beauty to this vital novel.

Starred review from October 15, 2017

In the aftermath of a brutal sexual assault, Peach, a lovely young college student, is not coping. Numbly dragging herself home, she avoids her parents, showers off the evidence, then, incredibly, stitches up her wounds with needle and thread from her mother's sewing basket. She is unable to tell anyone what happened to her--not her loving but preoccupied parents, not her doting boyfriend, and certainly not the police. Almost immediately, though, she begins receiving creepy letters from her attacker, whom she also believes is stalking her. At the same time, her stomach begins to bloat and grow larger, although a pregnancy test comes back negative. While her increasingly odd behavior concerns her parents and friends, they are unable to understand what is happening to her. VERDICT Gorgeously written, this debut novel is a haunting prose poem with surreal overtones. Highly recommended.--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2017
A young woman hyperviscerally experiences the aftermath of her rape. On the first page of Glass' slim debut novel, we meet Peach, a college student stumbling home in the dark after an apparent sexual assault. In truncated, lyrical language, Glass describes Peach scraping her knuckles along a wall, stopping to be sick, leaking blood from between her legs. In the hours and days that follow, the people in her life are largely oblivious to her clear distress--her sex-obsessed parents, her infant baby brother, her doting boyfriend, Green. As she deals with the aftermath of her assault, her perspective is badly warped: she believes her body, especially her belly, is distended and growing. She sees the people around her as food: her brother is a jelly baby (a British variation of a gummy bear), and she thinks of her science professor as Mr Custard, whose "limbs form from liquid....Blobs. Brilliant yellow. Bold, now. Bubbling." And she keeps catching glimpses--or are they hallucinations?--of Lincoln, her attacker, whom she sees as a sausage, greasy and fat, leering at her through windows or swinging from a streetlamp. As these visions turn into more direct threats, Peach realizes she has to take matters into her own hands before her attacker destroys everything she loves. Glass' stylized writing owes a clear debt to James Joyce's experimental prose, something she acknowledges in a note at the end of the book. Although that's a difficult effect to sustain across even a volume as slender as this one, Glass' prose is capable of breathtaking deftness. And the writing is much more than a gimmick: the clipped sentences and obsessive repetitions provide a terrifying window into a freshly traumatized psyche. With paragraphs that read like poems, this is a memorably crafted entry into the canon of revenge narratives.

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November 1, 2017
College-age narrator Peach has just escaped a horrific sexual assault, not nearly unscathed, in the first pages of this brief novel written in fluid, unconfined prose that calls to mind the work of Eimear McBride. ( I am held under dragged under I am underwhelmed. ) Peach discretely borrows the family sewing kit, stitches up her own wound to the point of blacking out, and keeps the attack to herself while her world becomes a claustrophobic, haunted funhouse. When Peach touches her baby brother, she can see right through the transparent jelly he's made of. Because of her immediately full, swollen belly, she can't eat or fit in her pants. Threatening, ransom-note-style letters from her attacker are delivered with a wink by her big-eyed, sex-obsessed parents. When her loving boyfriend, Green, and her pet cat also suffer violent attacks, Peach decides to take matters into her own hands. Glass, a practicing nurse in her native England, aptly portrays Peach's real and mythical struggles between emotion and reason, power and trauma in this darkly arresting debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)