Weekend

I loved the characters in this book. They drew me into the story so thoroughly, and they felt so real. When I was finished with the book, I wanted to go find them and friend them on Facebook so I could keep up with their stories.

Startling. Uncomfortable. Worth it, despite ending far too soon - reads like the first half of a story and leaves you wanting more. Depicts what we rarely get to read about - that who we are within our own biology is still an issue, perhaps even more so, at midlife. Lesbians, trans, bi-identified take heed.

I loved this book and recommend it to all readers. I enjoyed my visit to the world of these fascinating characters, and would have been happy if it went on much longer!

Sorry, but there were a lot of typos, syntax and verb tense and pronoun references were off throughout the book. I get the difficult topic and that did not bother me, but poor writing does. Who edited this book did a lousy job. I think the author has a story to tell, but this book needed ore work.

Don't waste your money. The characters are all a bunch of shallow, narcisstic navel gazers who need a reality check big time. The dialogue is crap; people don't talk to each other this way. And I was so distracted by the use of them/their as pronouns for one genderqueer character that even if I had liked the book it would have ruined it for me.

Jane Eaton Hamilton’s Weekend is a queer, crip reimagining of “What we talk about when we talk about love.” Two couples, one new and one together sixteen years, come together for a weekend in the country, unexpectedly confronting the demons of their current and past relationships. As one couple unravels under the stress of a newborn, the other wrestles with what it means to love and be loved in the face of a deadly disability.Weekend is sexy, tender, and raw, with smoldering sex scenes and intimate arguments that leave tender bruises at the intersections of disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, and class. Jane Eaton Hamilton exposes the exquisite and raw vulnerabilities of her characters with empathy and insight—the lesbian who secretly thinks she might be straight, the new mother anxious for her milk to come in, the “heart crip” domestic abuse survivor whose A-fib looms like a death threat, the maybe-trans boi who is terrified of losing the love their life.“Do you know what we talk about when we talk about love?” One of the women asks. Is love the sum total of things “we can tolerate”—“the vast list of things we give up for companionship?” Is love lust? Is it sacrifice? Perhaps no definition of love can account for the nostalgia one character feels about a lying, manipulative ex, or for taking a leap of fate in spite of impending death. Perhaps there isn’t even such a thing as a “queer” or “crip” version of Carver’s iconic story, because in the end, love all comes down to the same violence, the same loss, the same sacrifice, the same leaps of faith. And yet, it’s not the same, not at all, and that’s the beauty of Weekend, how it illuminates those universal themes but changes them, too, revealing how life on the fringes makes “what we talk about when we talk about love” a riskier and more terrifying proposition.

An accomplished poet, Jane Eaten Hamilton makes her novelistic debut with Weekend, an intimately rendered portrait of two couples in Canada's cottage country over a very emotional weekend for both, as one long-term couple finds itself on the way out of love and the other, a new couple not necessarily inclined to commitment, discover an intensity that may just hold them together. The clearly circumscribed setting and time period in which the drama unfolds helps set a fire under the simmering kettle of emotions in this book, and the addition of explicitly described BDSM sex play adds spice. Those scenes won't be for every reader, nor will the fact that this is a novel in conversations more than a novel in plot. But WEEKEND packs a strong emotional punch that will feel familiar to many readers and will stay with them for quite some time.

This novel is a sort of update to Raymond Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love". It's set over a weekend, it's two couples, and they're both queer. At times it was difficult for me to read because the characters are so vulnerable, and I felt this deep empathy for these people who have made themselves vulnerable to the people they love. There's no lesson in the book about how to love well; it's just a deep, thoughtful exploration of how hard it is to create and sustain an intimate relationship with another person. One couple is at the beginning of their relationship and another couple is a decade in, and it's just really smart, really nuanced and realistic.