This novel speculates on how people would behave if they knew that (romantic) love would last only a finite amount of time. Some people fight against the inevitable, forcing the "love of their life" to stay; others try to move beyond the dead romance towards friendship. The first story in this book (the romance between a woman who knows that the end of her love will be sudden and irreparable, and the man who sees her, and their love, as objects that can be preserved without consent) is interesting, but the second story, about a group of polyamorous characters, is not as captivating. ( )

I'm not quite sure what I think of this odd little reflection on the fleeting nature of love and the things we hang on to. It's one of those reads that I liked less the further I got into it.

It's my first Aliya Whiteley and I loved her prose - deft, emotionally evocative - but the second half with its unexpected shift in narrator left me completely at sea. ( )

Can I just start by saying, if you haven’t read anything by Aliya Whiteley before, do it now. The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley is such a hard hitting novel that reaches you on so many levels. You read the synopsis and think, boy, this is weird, but honestly, it makes the most sense. It feels like what The Time Traveler’s Wife should have been — a more realistic version with much better writing.

In this new dystopian world Whiteley builds, humans shed their skin regularly. When they do, all of their emotions go with it. You literally start a new. A physical manifestation of changes that normally happen to us on a microscopic level. People grow and change and grow apart. Yet here, everyone is on a ticking clock. Seven years, you know a relationship can last seven years. You have seven years maximum to love as hard as you can, create as many memories as you can before every piece of affection you held is torn from you and the person you’ve created a life with is nothing but a stranger you’ve a memory of. Sometimes, memory alone is enough to keep the relationship going.

Yet, it isn’t the case for Rose who suffers from a disorder that causes her not only to shed her skin sporadically, but also produces intense disgust and revulsion. She can’t bare to have any reminders of her past life. So what happens? What happens when you love and love and love and it’s suddenly gone? And the person you loved can’t stand to be near you and you can’t stand to move on? It’s just so incredibly heart-wrenching and before I could even realize what Whiteley had done, I was in tears with that feeling and knowledge that had caught me unawares.

What Whiteley does so amazingly well is not only to create a love story with sadness, in fact there are multiple love stories and one is not so sad! What she excels at is creating relationships that are complex and real. Relationships that can endure a change and relationships that cannot. She creates characters that you love and feel so heartbroken for but also despise and recognize they would be a creep in real life. This book, though it doesn’t read like it and doesn’t sound like, it truly an amazing commentary on relationships and what it takes to be sustainable through the different facets every person goes through.

I wholeheartedly encourage every reader to pick up The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley. It’s the perfect introduction to an amazing author whom I’m frankly quite upset is still indie and not adored by legions of readers.

// I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this title. // ( )

In a world where humans moult every few years, losing whatever romantic love they had (which can be felt in the discarded skin), a movie star carries out a horrific act against his former bodyguard/lover, who has an extreme form of moulting that leaves her revolted by her past lives. Later, as science develops anti-moulting drugs, various related characters try to figure out what that means and what happened to the bodyguard. It was okay I guess but I didn’t get much out of the AU. ( )