The story of two women circling one another—working side-by-side, sleeping with the same man, inching toward friendship—until an unplanned pregnancy reveals the true nature of their connection.
Stark and disaffected ... Quietly radical ... Jules is an unreliable narrator. It takes the reader so long to understand this that, to use a technical phrase, it blows your mind to realize how you’ve subtly misread her. Stringing us along so deftly is part of Sams’s achievement ... The book is heartbreaking (and coolly frightening) in ways one does not see coming ... I don’t want to oversell Gunk. It’s a young person’s book, and its range is limited. Yet limited mostly in a propulsive way ... Gunk slowly ripens, on its B-side, into something close to tragedy.
This is not your average staccato millennial novel. Jules is not a hot mess, there are no ponderings on late-stage capitalism or the climate apocalypse. Instead, Gunk is a warm, often funny novel about an unconventional partnership.
Questions about desire, dual purposes and the ways in which we act out our love for each other seep through this book ... Saba Sams depicts a love growing between two women that is romantic, at times explosive, and evades a label – an exploration of a chosen family that sits in uncertainty.
