Review: Waif by Samantha Kolesnik

Angie is married to a startlingly rich and abusive man. She’s not attracted to him anymore, so it’s no surprise when she sees a man at the grocery store who appears to be everything she’s ever fantasized about. When she tells her husband about this encounter, he starts making changes that send them both down into a world that’s impossible to leave.

Like so many other people have done, let me start by saying that Samantha Kolesnik is one hell of a writer. Books that include domestic violence can easily go sideways, but Waif never does. This book is tamer than her previous book, the equally excellent True Crime also published by Grindhouse Press, but it’s also more finely crafted and refined. Kolesnik uses the novella form in such a skillful way, giving the reader as much as they need and then pulling back and moving on. It doesn’t weigh heavily in one place but moves through the story at a satisfying pace.

There is a lot of justified anger in this book, mostly at how women suffer at the hands of men, and the ways that anger plays out is super gratifying.

I really can’t wait until more people I know read this so I can talk with them about it. There’s a lot going on in here about gender and sexuality and The Body™ and compulsive heterosexuality that just screams for someone smarter than me to unpack and think on.

I might as well mention that I loved this book so much that I read it in one day and couldn’t get it out of my head. I tried to read something else afterward but just picked this up instead and reread it a few days later.

5/5 rusty scalpels

I was in the world of men alone, as my mother had warned me I would eventually be. The world of men requires certain sacrifices of me and I had simply tired of making them. It was high time for men to sacrifice for me. To give generously for my affection—to give of their bodies, not just of their wallets. Paying for dinner was easy. Paying with your flesh, as women have been expected to do since the dawn of time? That was hard.

Waif, Samantha Kolesnik