Wetlands

Wetlands
Charlotte Roche

Not at all what I expected. A very funny book, albeit one with a grim message about the state of today’s feminism. Eighteen-year-old Helen Memel’s one-woman war against feminine hygiene is both ribald and pathetic, but with the latter more often than not winning out. And yet one feels truly frightened at the end for the male nurse Robin, the most recent object of Helen’s attention. Credit Roche for this: it’s a remarkable achievement to create a first person narrator who is so unconsciously unreliable, so dangerous without even being aware of it: the fully liberated modern woman as a psychopath.