[b:Hot Milk|26883528|Hot Milk|Deborah Levy|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1461535043s/26883528.jpg|46932640] is a wild ride. Sometimes the richness of her writing is almost too much, like a cheesecake layered with caramel and chocolate but imaginative. The plot involves a young anthropology graduate, Sophie, fond of field studies, and her wheelchair-bound mother who drinks water "as if she had been asked to drink her own urine." They seek a medical cure for Rose at an unusual clinic in the Spanish beach town of Almería. Dr. Gómez runs the clinic with his daughter and he is as unpredictable as his dialog and passion for cats "We were talking about Wi-Fi," Gómez continued. 'I will tell you the answer to my riddle. I say "wee-fee" to rhyme with "Francis of Assisi." His mouth is black from eating pulpo sharing it with the felines.
A brief visit to Greece lets Sophie reconnect with her indifferent father and his child bride and new baby daughter. The author uses objects in every sentence to describe her characters and their relationships, lives, activities.
Levy's new memoir is next on my list.

"All summer, I had been moonwalking in the digital Milky Way. It's calm there. But I am not calm. My mind is like the edge of motorways where foxes eat the owls at night. In the starfields, with their faintly glowing paths running across the screen, I have been making footprints in the dust and glitter of the virtual universe. It never occurred to me that, like the medusa, technology stares back and that is gaze might have petrified me, made me fearful to come down, down to Earth, where all the hard stuff happens, down to the check-out tills and the barcodes and the too many words for profit and the not enough words for pain." ( )

Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and the doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the infamous and controversial Dr Gomez – a man of questionable methods and motives. Intoxicated by thick heat and the seductive people who move through it, both women begin to see their lives clearly for the first time in years.

Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike and utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern and timeless.

Check out the article I wrote recently on Deborah Levy
https://quizlit.org/deborah-levy-the-woman-who-sees-everything ( )

unlikable characters form the most part, a dreamlike vibe from the story, wonderful writing and it is a book open to each readers own interpretations. not even how i really feel about it. this is well written novel. quick to read, but not so quick to immediately comprehend without some serious thinking. why is this story set in southern spain? and what's the connection of the location to the title of the book? ( )

This was a book club selection.

Hot Milk is about a young woman, Sophia, and her ailing mother, Rose, as they travel to southern Spain to seek treatment. Their relationship, and every other relationship presented in the novel, are all dysfunctional, bordering on toxic. It is a novel about self-discovery, acceptance of self and family, and taking charge of one's own life. I found the writing to be very good, but the characters didn't resonate with me. I didn't identify with, or even like, any of them. The book had a strange vibe about it, almost surreal, helped along by the extreme weather and scenery of southern Spain. ( )

Sofia takes her invalid mother to Spain to consult a local specialist who may be able to diagnose her mother's mysterious ailments. While there Sofia encounters Ingrid, an ex-pat German, and begins a fraught relationship with this enigmatic stranger.

I could not get into this book at all. It's a litany of various relationships Sofia has with women, men, the doctor, the nurse, her mother, her father and her step-mother, with continual false starts. Just as you think Levy is about to take Sofia somewhere, somebody walks into the scene, distracts matters, the plot is derailed and the reader left dangling again. Levy forces the issue at the end and opts for a melodramatic finish, but there is still so much left unresolved that the reader can only be left unsatisfied.
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