Consider Yourself Kissed (Jessica Stanley, Text)
Consider Yourself Kissed is a romance set in London against the backdrop of the UK’s escalating political crises of the 21st century: Tory leadership struggles and re-election and Brexit, culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s also a story of personal crisis, exploring the labels women adopt that render them invisible: ‘mother, writer, worker, sister, friend, citizen, daughter, (sort of) wife’. Coralie has fled an abusive workplace and break-up in Sydney and moved to London. A writer now channelling her creative energy into marketing, she’s ripe for a meet-cute, which the novel delivers early on. Enter Adam, a political commentator and devoted father to his four-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. Consider Yourself Kissed is not the tumultuous bildungsroman we’ve come to expect from romances set in the big city. Instead, it’s a novel about finding love but losing yourself and the journey to reclaiming that self. Jessica Stanley (A Great Hope) acutely paints the entrapment of motherhood and the gendered distribution of domestic labour, even in a progressive, loving relationship. The novel balances literary depth and a breezy, engaging style, making Consider Yourself Kissed the elusive next Sorrow and Bliss for fans of Tia Williams and Miranda Cowley Heller. Stanley portrays Coralie with tenderness, capturing a complicated woman on the precipice of breaking. She interrogates the premise of a ‘happily ever after’ in a domestic setting, delivering a lovable, compelling novel about what it means to be a woman today.
Books+Publishing reviewer: Emily Westmoreland is the program director of Willy Lit Fest, the founder of Dinner Party Press and part of the prize-team behind the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She works as a bookseller by day. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.
Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
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