Permission by Saskia Vogel

Much of this novel is narrated by Echo, who’s in her mid-twenties and grew up on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, though she now has her own apartment in LA. She’s adrift: she started acting as a teen and has been trying to build a career in it, but she’s not been getting any parts lately; she has an ongoing hookup situation with a dude who’s a musician who lives with his parents, but finds herself thinking about her high school best friend, Ana, who she had been hooking up with when they were in school together (until Ana’s dad walked in on them), but from whom she’s now estranged. We don’t get a sense of the shape of Echo’s normal daily life—her routines or lack thereof, her friends or lack thereof—because her life is up-ended near the start of the book by her father’s unexpected death. She goes to stay with her mom in her childhood home, and the two of them are stuck in their grief (not that her parents’ marriage had been particularly happy; not that anyone in the family seems like a particularly easy person). Meanwhile, she meets Orly, who’s in her thirties and has just moved in across the street with a slightly older male housemate, Lonnie, also known as Piggy. It turns out that Orly works as a dominatrix, which intrigues Echo, and a lot of the book ends up being about Orly and Echo’s quick/newfound intimacy, and also the strain that this puts on Piggy, whose normal routines are interrupted by Echo’s presence. The writing is lush and often lovely, but there is a whole lot of unease in this book. I like the descriptions of the coastal California landscape, though: the threat of earthquakes, but the beauty of whales; jasmine and honeysuckle and roses; jacaranda blossoms. And I like how Echo is trying to figure out how to navigate desire and grief, and how part of doing that, for her, is finding comfort in the physical in a way different from what she’s known in the past. Also: the final two pages of this book, in which Echo goes to the beach at night, are so beautiful and so good: such a perfect ending, not a resolution but a sense of possibility, of more.