Wetlands by Charlotte Roche is a provocative and unconventional novel that delves into the life of 18-year-old Helen Memel, who finds herself in a hospital due to a shaving mishap. The book explores Helen's unhygienic habits, her candid discussions about bodily functions, and her attempts to reconcile her divorced parents. The writing style is raw, explicit, and unapologetic, challenging societal norms and pushing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in literature.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Content warnings for Wetlands include graphic sexual content, bodily fluids, discussions of mental health issues, and depictions of self-harm.
From The Publisher:
An international sensation-with more than one million copies sold in Germany, and rights snapped up in twenty-seven countries-Wetlands is the sexually and anatomically explicit novel that is changing the conversation about female identity and sexuality around the world.
Helen Memel is an outspoken, contradictory eighteen-year-old, whose childlike stubbornness is offset by a precocious sexual confidence. She begins her story from a hospital bed, where she's slowly recovering from an operation and lamenting her parents' divorce. To distract and console herself, Helen ruminates on her past sexual and physical adventures in increasingly uncomfortable detail; what ensues is "a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct-both physical and psychological-of Helen's body and mind." (The New York Times).
Fantastically sexual, Helen is constantly blurring the line between celebration, provocation, and dysfunction in her relationship with her body. Punky alienated teenager, young woman reclaiming her body from the tyranny of repressive hygiene (women mustn't smell, excrete, desire), bratty smartass, vulnerable, lonely daughter, shock merchant, and pleasure seeker-Helen is all of these things and more, and her frequent attempts to assert her maturity ultimately prove just how fragile, confused, and young she truly is.
In the tradition of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. and Melissa P.'s 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, Charlotte Roche exposes the double bind of female sexuality, delivering a compulsively readable and fearlessly intimate manifesto on sex, hygiene, and the repercussions of family trauma.
Ratings (4)
Loved It (2) | |
Did Not Like (2) |
Reader Stats (10):
Read It (4) | |
Want To Read (4) | |
Not Interested (2) |
1 comment(s)
I love the premise of this book and its glee in transgression, but the writer is not skilled enough to pull it off. The prose is boring and becomes repetitive. This is the kind of narrator who NEEDS to be witty to pull off her shtick, and it doesn't cut the mustard. The movie is better!
What can you read after
Wetlands?
About the Author:
Charlotte Roche was born in England in 1978 and raised in Germany, where she still resides with her husband and daughter. She is an award-winning television personality in Germany, and Wetlands is her first novel.
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