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The Pisces

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The Pisces

By: Melissa Broder
Narrated by: Isabella Inchbald
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About this listen

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019

Profoundly modern, deeply disturbed and darkly comic, The Pisces is about heartbroken PhD student who over one summer falls in dangerous, ecstatic love with a merman.

Lucy, staying in a beautiful home overlooking Venice Beach, can find no peace from her misery - not in therapy, not in Tinder hookups, not in her sister's dog's unquestioning devotion, not in ruminating on the ancient Greeks. Yet everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer one night while sitting alone on the beach rocks....

Pairing neurotic hilarity with pulse-racing carnality and fierce feminism, The Pisces is hot, bothered and unforgettable. Traversing the lines between fantasy and reality, it explores the questions of how and why we stay alive. This fairy-tale romance with a merman could just be the sanest and most human novel you listen to all year.

©2018 Melissa Broder (P)2018 Audible, Ltd Contemporary Fiction Fiction Genre Fiction Heartfelt Fantasy Merfolk
All stars
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I'm sure there was a message behind this book but I missed it.
Couple of juicy scenes but not worth writing home about.

Little to no story line

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The weirdest book ever - like honestly! Maybe if the dog wasnt neglected I may if felt a little differently.

WTF

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Well performed. Many accents helped distinguish the characters voices. I will look for other work by this reader.

Main character is angry and depressed and occasionally unlikable but her honesty allowed me to like her enough to want to keep reading her story. I liked the ending.

Best performance of the year

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Very entertaining! Lots of laughs! I felt as though I was listening to someone’s very intrusive thoughts!

Loved the morale of the story!

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I persisted but couldn’t get to the end. Life is too short. The women on this journey are shallow, laced with self hate in a dystopian setting. I should have stopped after the description of a dog defecating. This was not for me.

Not finished

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I’m so annoyed I wasted time reading another one of Melissa Broder’s books, she has never written a likeable female character (writing unlikeable women is a beautiful art) but one must think this is just a mirror of Melissa herself as she merely copy/pastes the same ‘main character’ every time, uncaring, self involved, misogynistic, racists (there is never a person of colour in a Melissa Broder book) who is ultimately always given this odd redemption tour, but actually the characters to me at least feel by the time you suffocate on the last page, that they are colder one dimensional sociopaths than you initially observed on page one. A huge trigger warning to any animal lovers too. Particularly dogs.
Also her vernacular and vocabulary is so rudimentary, how is this person still getting book deals?! Eugh. Zero stars.

Melissa Broder hates women

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Perhaps the reviews in various papers fooled me, I was expecting a romantic smut book. This was a sad negative tale about a selfish woman who mistreats her friends, herself and an animal

A horrible woman who abuses her dog

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.