laura_oosterbeek | Narrative Muse

Laura Oosterbeek

Laura is a Promiscuous Reader and Book Club Slut who spends her time biking around looking for sidewalk cats and browsing bookstalls. She is obsessed with Donna Tartt and drinks her coffee black. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, she lives in Cambridge UK.

Reviews by Laura Oosterbeek:

The Water Cure book cover

I’ve never visualized a book as much as I have this feminist dystopia. It’s one of sisters dressed in white linen and a house illuminated in solitude.

Crudo book cover

This novel is as novel as it gets. Written in real time over the Summer of 2017, Crudo speaks to the now and is terrifyingly relevant.

Too Much and Not the Mood book cover

Too Much and Not the Mood

I want to see the world like Durga does: to miss the crucial plot points because I’ve been too busy noticing the prose.

Rookie On Love thumbnail of to pinkies crossed

An easy paperback of original essays, interviews, stories, poetry, and comics that reminded me of the love that leaks like light into my life.

Image: Winter Book Cover

The second of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet Winter arrived when I needed it most – in a physical winter, but also a winter of global identity.

Image: Strange Heart Beating

Strange Heart Beating

This is a darkly funny musing on the story of a woman who chose not to disclose her entire story. She chose not to be a possession.

Image: If We Were Villains

If We Were Villains

M.L. Rio’s unreliable narrator drew me in. I loved delighting in the twists and being left (at the turn of the final page) with a book hangover.

Image: Conversations with Friends

Conversations with Friends

This is a true reflection of what it feels like to be a millennial. Frances is flawed, intelligent, hypocritical, narcissistic, emotional and creative.

Image: Fates and Furies

Fates and Furies

A practice in unreliable narration, Fates and Furies is a novel that makes you comfortable, and then pulls the chair out from under you.

Image: The Luminaries

In the depths of the dark Winter, the The Luminaries allowed me to spend time on the shores of New Zealand’s wild coast - home.

Image: The Rehearsal

The girls “obsessively examine the details of the affair with the curiosity, jealousy, and approbation native to any adolescent girl.”

Image: Difficult Women

Difficult Women

Being difficult is an insult, and a command to disappear. But being difficult is our main weapon, a difficult woman is one who should be celebrated.

Image: The Essex Serpent

The Essex Serpent

Set in 1893, men rule the world. But upon the death of her husband, Cora has freedom - freedom to become a scientist and freedom to live as she pleases.

Image: The Lesser Bohemians

The Lesser Bohemians

Sex opens wounds and brings their dark pasts into harsh and blinding light. It’s a love story that is purely original and fresh.

Image: Flâneuse: Women Walk the City

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City

The flâneur is seen but unseen, and free to do as s[he] pleases. It's a musing on women who walk and why they do so; through New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Venice.