I plan to learn enough to read you like a book.
I plan to give this book to you and know you’ll read it,
So our minds may meet across its pages
In the colorful country of another writer’s language…
Pages for You
Winner of a Lambda fiction award in 2002. Pages for You was reissued by Picador US in June 2017.
In a steam-filled diner in an east coast college town, Californian freshman Flannery Jansen catches sight of the most beautiful person she’s ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The seventeen-year-old is shocked by her own desire to follow this beauty wherever it might take her.
As luck would have it, Flannery finds herself enrolled in a class with the remote, brilliant older woman: she is intimidated at first, but gradually becomes Anne Arden’s student outside of class as well. Whatever the subject—Baudelaire, lipstick colors, or how to travel with a lover—Flannery proves an eager pupil, until one day she learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.
Praise
“The novel is bathed in a joyful, cloistered mood of sensual celebration.” —The New York Times
“Delightfully rendered and sharply written. . . offers up the meat and drink of fantasy: erotic tension, sensual sex scenes and a gifted, beautiful main character with whom to identify.” —Newsday
“Poignant but never saccharine, Pages for You captures the grand gesture and petty humiliations, the ecstasies and embarrassments of first love.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“A pitch-perfect evocation of a young woman journeying through a year of awakenings. . . . Such a winning heroine that will compel readers of all sexual orientations who recall the thrill and anguish of growing up. This elegantly rendered, poignant novel, is ultimately about awakenings both bright and rude, the intoxicating nature of desire and the realization that love can devastate just as easily as it exalts.” —The Village Voice
“Brownrigg nicely observes the course of infatuation and her lack of fuss about the gender of the lovers is refreshing.” — (A) Entertainment Weekly
“Pages for You hums with awakened sensuality and the electricity of a newly ignited mind.” —The Hartford Courant
“Like Turgenev or Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Brownrigg understands that the inexperienced lover is a detective who doesn’t know which clues matter. ” —The Times