Sylvia\u2014along with her faithful girlfriend, Charlie\u2014arrives at the lake house of her university friend Karen. The secluded weeklong vacation is intended to be a much-needed reunion of their old friend group, which also includes reserved Esben, wild Quince, and caring Gry, who\u2019s also brought her husband, Adam. After the first day among the \u201cquiet and dazzling\u201d lake and \u201csilver birch trees,\u201d Karen and Esben, who have been in love since the group\u2019s undergraduate days, announce that they intend to get married during the vacation. Everyone is excited except Sylvia, who\u2019s had a decade-long crush on Esben. The news sends her into a tailspin of yearning, causing her to doubt her own feelings about monogamy. \u201cWe could be living this utopian life together,\u201d she argues to her friends, who are all settled in adulthood, \u201cbut instead\u2026you have to choose between loneliness or a twosome, which is the same as loneliness.\u201d Ernst\u2019s novel explores the boundaries we maintain and the boundaries we are willing to cross in pursuit of romantic and platonic love. Through the loving, reminiscent, and sometimes awkward exchanges between old friends, the reader learns which insecurities define an entangled group of millennials hoping to impress each other: \u201cEsben looks at the table, takes stock\u2014is there an i to dot? He goes back inside, returns holding champagne and fruit juice, bottles dewy with cold.\u201d Ernst brings the lush setting of the novel alive, using descriptions of food\u2014like the \u201ccrisp and fatty\u201d fried wild elder blossoms\u2014to highlight the physical decadence of the Danish countryside and the ideological decadence of Sylvia\u2019s proposed nonmonogamous utopia.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sylvia\u2014along with her faithful girlfriend, Charlie\u2014arrives at the lake house of her university friend Karen. The secluded weeklong vacation is intended to be a much-needed reunion of their old friend group, which also includes reserved Esben, wild Quince, and caring Gry, who\u2019s also brought her husband, Adam. After the first day among the \u201cquiet and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6546"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}