We’re back with another Goodreads Monday, a weekly meme started by @Lauren’s Page Turners. This meme invites you to pick a book from your TBR and explain why you want to read it. Easy enough, right? Feel free to join in if you want to! I’ll be using a random number generator to pick my books from my insanely long GR Want-to-read list.

This week’s book is Please Read This Leaflet Carefully by Karen Havelin. This was one of the more recent additions to my TBR this year, when I saw a post about it when it released in May. It’s a contemporary medical fiction and it’s got 3.97 stars with 254 ratings and 48 reviews.

Please Read This Leaflet Carefully, the debut novel from Norwegian writer and translator Karen Havelin, is the story of a woman whose body has become her enemy.

The novel tracks backward, from 2016 until 1995, etching details of daily life into a gripping and darkly humorous bildungsroman, about the intricacies of love and life in a fragile body.

We meet Laura Fjellstad first as she works and cares for her young daughter, while struggling with debilitating pain and endometriosis, an invisible chronic illness.

As the reader moves in reverse to meet Laura’s younger and somewhat healthier selves (a hopeful bride in New York, a baby queer in Paris, a figure skater in Norway) we uncover her tireless work to gain control of her identity, her illness and the conflicting demands made by doctors, friends, lovers and family.

Man Booker Prize-winning author Paul Beatty says most books about disease try to describe the pain; told in poetic whisper, Karen Havelin’s debut novel lets pain speak for itself. It’s a book that dares you be nosy, to eavesdrop and listen in to a stoic young woman whom no one noticed until she began to disappear, her body disintegrating from the inside out until there’s nothing left but searing agony and almost impossibly―a burning triumph.

Jarringly funny and perceptive; an intimate reckoning with the inner demons and precarity of everyday life, unpacked through the very specific lens of a woman with chronic pain. 

Why do I want to read it?

I remember seeing Jaz talking about receiving this book over on bookstagram when it came out earlier this year and I was immediately captivated by the idea of it–and I mean, after reading that synopsis, aren’t you too? The few people I know who’ve read this book, and also live with a chronic illness, have all highly praised this book and it just makes me so much more excited to read it. I think when people who have experienced what a character is going through and identifies with it so much, it really says something about what an amazing story it is. I’m very much looking forward to reading this one and I have a feeling I’m going to really enjoy it! I just have to find out where to get it… 🙈

Have you read Please Read This Leaflet Carefully or is it on your TBR too?