Hayley Kirscher’s You Belong To Me (out April 15, 2025) is a compendium of hot topics seemingly tailored for the algorithm. It’s got cults, skincare, girls kissing, goths, spot-on references to gothic literature. It’s almost tailor-made for the TikTok savvy teen.
It’s also an empathetic exploration of power, belonging, and identity. Refreshingly, that last one doesn’t have to do with main character Frances Bean (not Cobain)’s queerness. She knows she likes girls, especially one particular girl: the enigmatic, beautiful Julia Patterson, daughter to glamorous beauty and lifestyle entrepreneur Deena Patterson. She knows, her friends know, her mother knows, and no one says boo.
What Bean doesn’t know is who she is outside of those relationships. But she is young, in love and, like most folks, looking for someone to belong with. Someone to belong to. And like many such people, her eyes go over the heads of family and friends who are themselves struggling with trauma that complicates the ways they show care, and zero-in on the literally picture-perfect visuals of white lace and woo-smoothies that is Deena Patterson’s Deep brand collective. She swallows the aspirational messaging as smoothly as the ubiquitous turmeric shots, and thus begins a head-spinning journey into the harms at the heart of a company that claims to be all about healing.
I wanted to write about how Krischer explores the importance of vulnerability in intimate connection, how it can create contexts for healing and conversely abuse. How she explored one of my favorite literary conceits: the draw of the Other, of desiring difference. How it goes both ways between Bean and Julia, a reciprocal razor’s edge that allows both of them to give voice to desires they are unable to reconcile with the values of their respective mothers and friend groups. How Krischer also does not opt for a simplistic flattening of the very real, tangible, thorny inequities at play in their relationship—with class disparities acknowledged throughout the novel, particularly in depicting how the security and sense of control that comes with money and class can be seductive to those who grew up with greater material precarity. How calling the brand Femme co-opts queer slang to sell a commodified femininity meant to appeal to heterosexual men—reduces a term that carries an implicit demand for emotional labor, performed desire, and its attendant anxieties into “girlishness”.
But I will restrain myself to saying that Krischer is very good at dramatic irony. The reader is a spectator, an audience member watching as the pieces fall into place over the heads of the characters. Like when Deena waxes sympathetic about being born in Brooklyn, going to beauty school, being a mother at 25 as credentials of her “earthiness”—never mind what we’ve already learned about her coming from money, “summering in France”, and attending ritzy European boarding schools.
*Cue Common People by Pulp*
I’ll admit that while I found the centering of Bean’s friend Ivy’s goth identity and its connection to her Blackness heartwarmingly refreshing, I would have appreciated a bit more incisiveness in addressing the rampant Orientalism in the “wellness” industry. Lines like “I thought only hippies from the nineties used patchouli…reminds me of when I lived in San Francisco”, while providing context for Bean’s (white) countercultural background, elide the histories of gestures like “prayer hands”, words like “guru” and scents many people in the US associate with, like, Haight-Ashbury and head shops—and now infuse in pricey perfumes and skincare products. I would have appreciated a line or two from about that, but I’ll take the take-down of beauty brands targeting teenage vulnerabilities.
I will also mention that You Belong to Me is a thriller first and foremost, which means that the narrative is significantly more plot than character-driven, inasmuch as it focuses on Bean’s internal emotional state. Mystery fans might find ending a bit too neat, too pat in the way everyone’s actions fall into resolution. Romance fans looking for a cute affirming read might be disappointed that themes of systemic trauma and abuse are major narrative drivers, with a greater focus on the tensions in the non-romantic dynamics than on developing the sapphic relationship. Julia and Bean’s budding romance is more like a product of their projected desires, which I suppose rings true to many teen (and adult) romances, where we fall more for someone’s persona and what it seems to promise us than the actual person and all their messy contradictions — especially as teens, when those contradictions are in their nascence. It also mirrors overarching themes about how “lifestyle/wellness” brands sell a promise, a hope, an aspiration more than anything of deeper substance (heh).
That said, from the first page to the last, Krischer’s empathy for her vulnerable young characters shines through. Other highlights include an immediacy in the prose that I would have warmly, voraciously welcomed as a teenager. It’s propulsive, fast-burning, and keeps you on the edge of your seat. Krischer’s descriptions of space and movement are also cinematic. All the stark, nearly sterile status-conscious consumer opulence of Challengers and the sinister-melancholic suburban mystique of Coppola, with the buzzing wrongness of those horror movies where a fly maligns tense, Rockwell-esque dinners.
Best paired with Toni Morrison’s Playing in The Dark, Christy Harrison’s The Wellness Trap, Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, or acclaimed lesbian poet Pat Barker’s Jonestown & other madness, depending on what parts of the story the reader finds most compelling.
Content Warnings: child sexual abuse (off page), sexual assault (off page), murder, death, substance use, underage drinking, cults
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