Pleasure Beach

by Helen Palmer

Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16 June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way.

Pleasure Beach breathes and exhales the unique sea air, fish and chips, donuts and candyfloss scents of Blackpool, bringing to life everything the town is famous for, portraying the gritty magic and sheer unadulterated fun of the city and its people across a spectrum of sensory experiences and emotions.

Genres: Queer, Book Club, LGBT, Lesbian, Fiction

352 pages, Paperback

Published June 16, 2023

Reviews

[El G · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book has sticky vibes about it. Can't even explain really but it's dirt under your finger nails it's unwashed hair and a tshirt you've worn for a week straight. Bad breath and snogging strangers anyway.
This is experimental writing that is actually good because whilst I didn't understand everything that was going on it was still spinning me into the worlds and minds of it's characters. Gorg 4/5.

[Andrew Hatch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A ride as disorienting as one of the titular theme park’s rickety wooden coasters. (Only the author has broken you in after dark and led you across the park with a torch so that you can’t see the bends in the track and just have to surrender to the twists and turns and allow your mass to slide across the seat and trust that the safety bar, which may or may not be locked in place, will stop you flinging out into the car park.) I could equally be describing the experience of being human or of reading this traumatising, enlightening miracle of a debut novel.

Palmer’s primary objective is not merely to betray her characters’ thoughts and feelings but to give us a first-hand experience of them.

Her extremely fluid stream-of-consciousness prose style is perfectly suited to this task.

She at once shrinks us down to microscopic size and conveys us through the “fizz-poppery” of her protagonists’ thought — repurposing raw human consciousness as a mode of liquid conveyance, a log flume, a funfair freak show where every twitch of a character’s mind is made into its own standalone diorama and then pored over and iterated and transmogrified through exquisite and exquisitely entertaining wordplay — before catapulting us high high high over the whole play, the whole benighted town, like the PlayStation ride, so that we can suddenly see everything from above, and every macroscopic thing Palmer’s philosophical helicopter searchlight passes over — Marxism, feminism, capitalism, oh my! — is made as bright and legible and relatable as the neon FANTA lettering up the side of Blackpool Tower.

The experience of reading Palmer’s prose is visceral, you are not simply with her characters you are in them.

This is a demanding, linguistically virtuosic novel which is primarily enjoyed in the head, in the noggin, but you can tell it was written from the heart and it has left an indelible scorch mark on mine. (Will someone please scrape my twitching corpse up off the car park now?)

[Hayley]

notes to m on what reading this book was like:

ok i'm home and like pleasure beach was honestly a trip

it was difficult to read and challenging and dizzying and i enjoyed it SO much and it's so good at capturing this moment of not knowing and not being ready and being super blitzed by this other person u meet

and the ending is like soooo bittersweet especially when there's that whole section about olga's possible future but that's also so much not the point of the story it's about that moment of being in the thick of it

oand ughhhhh i think so much of lit about girlhood and coming of age can be rly dumbed down and i love that this wasn't just chef's kiss!!! it was so unabashedly itself and makes me too want to be a bolder writer

[Flo · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s obvious that Helen Palmer can write beautifully but sadly I really struggled to finish this. I found all the different experimental styles disjointed and hard to unlock. There were flashes that were brilliant but mostly I found this frustrating, knotted with literary references and overly clever (the formulas attached to each chapter really added nothing in my view).

Also someone else pointed out that the characters are oddly romanticised (esp Rachel who has recurring suicidal thoughts and self harms) and I agree this was weird and unnecessary.

[Saoirse Wall · Rating 4 out of 5]

i enjoyed this so much! fun and silly at but also serious and sad and moving. i would say that for me it was a page-turner. at times it felt like almost gimmicky in a way that could be annoying but i enjoyed it too much for my feelings to go there. made me want to revisit ulysses which i only tried to read once when i was 18 and homesick for ireland. made me want to fall in love. made me want to pretend to be a cat and run toward the sea.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 ⭐️

[Ryan]

Really incredible.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

dare i say... best book ive read this year ???

[Matt Glassett · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a FUN book authors need to have some more FUN with their writing!

[Rosa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars .. so I first saw this book in a museum book shop in London like eight months ago and I loved the cover and how it sounded and I just kept it on my mind and ended up ordering it for my birthday couple months ago and just got around to reading it now. I am so impressed with the form of this book. I think that is its greatest accomplishment. It really defies structure and theme and is a real genre bender in terms of its narrative style, Its characters … kind of revolutionary! I wouldn’t say that I found all of the writing particularly compelling, but I was propelled through the book by Helen Palmer’s exploratory choices as an author and it made me want to read the odyssey … and Ulysses ... It’s a feat of a book, no matter what - it makes sense that this is her first foray into fiction. I’m definitely glad I read it but I don’t think I would recommend it to friends because of its untraditional structure. I don’t know if everyone would be as gripped with the form as I was given that the prose can be a little dense and confusing. That being said Helen Palmer, you’re a queen!!

[Sofia Carey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind-bending and electric!!!!!!!

[Amy Baxter · Rating 4 out of 5]

why have more people not read this…

[Natasha Srinivas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sorry Mia I tried I wanna like a book where the main character works in a chippy soooo badly

[Esme · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5

the triumph of this book is its form and genre-bending quality — and the take on the take on the odyssey

but the characters are opaque and hard to empathise with (and oddly romanticised ?) and i rushed through it so i wouldn’t have to spend anymore time on them

[Sarah Ohh Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An epic feminist tale full of intimacy, emotion, vulnerability, romance, fun, bodies and the senses.

Written through three main teenage, female voices and jumping between different timelines on 16 June 1999, I could relate to so many of the themes as a woman in her late 30s.

It’s an everyday kinda queer love story, set on and drawing upon the many textures of its backdrop - Blackpool, a seaside town of specific stereotypes which are explored, some confirmed and others exploded.

Use of different writing styles and streams of consciousness are used in an extremely accessible and modest way, engaging the reader in the mindscapes of the three protagonists as they go through their day in which they fade in and out of thoughts and physical beings with each other.

It’s such an honest snapshot of pre millennium teenage experimentation, hopes, dreams and demons.

I love this book and can’t wait to read it again - I know it’s a book that will keep on giving over and over. Read it right now!!!

[may · Rating 4 out of 5]

Attention all literature freakes, gargoyles, and holdovers of the ‘experimental-fiction-GR old guard’:

This book is good. It does Ulysses things. Put it on the shelf next to all of those other perambulatory tomes (you know the ones).

Remember the big fuckoff walk in body and fake seaside resort in the millennium dome?

This is kind of like if you learned that the designers of those exhibitions were two notquitetwentyyearold gay women who had a feverish LSD induced joint-nightmare where Blackpool took shape as a skinless and groaning corpse, too large to support its own weight.

One of them interpreted the dream as an omen of the Britain to come, the other was way too zonked out to do anything other than write poems in her head.

Then they got through it by sniffing lines of baby powder cut cocaine and tribbing.

Happy 2025, all!
Kiss a girl and tell her you love her.

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was like nothing I’ve read before. You get to know the characters by living in their thoughts. 100 thoughts a second. Fragmented and experimental. This was a really interesting read and I would recommend it and would read something else by this author.

[mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

i have very complex feelings bout this book. i think it undoubtedly achieves what it set out to do, the allusions to the odyssey and ulysses really work for it and it’s nice to have a female focused take on these (sometimes quite misogynistic) male dominated epics. i loved the list of chemical symbols and rides at the start of each chapter, i thought it was very clever and tied the book together nicely. the style i found was quite experimental and at points i really enjoyed that but at others it became a bit tedious for me, kind of being complicated and pretentious just for the sake of being complicated and pretentious, though maybe this was the point especially in rachel’s sections. i thought the style worked well to represent a mind tainted by drugs and alcohol, i think that that experience was represented quite well. however i don’t know how believable i found the internal dialogues both olga and rachel had, it almost seemed to intelligent for two 19 year old girls, even if they were the smartest 19 year olds, i can’t help but think it seemed too much like an older academic mind! i would have liked to know more about treesa as i found her the most compelling/least annoying (oftentimes i found both olga and rachel mildly insufferable) and until the end sections i didn’t fully understand her inclusion as the narrative rarely focused on her until the end. i picked this book up because i’m a queer girl from blackpool so felt like i could relate to it, i can’t help but wonder if this is the main reason i got so much enjoyment out of it. i’m not a fan of ulysses at all and everything i don’t really like about that book i didn’t like about this one either so it was probably just a poor choice from me. it was definitely an enjoyable read and was so fun hearing about all the spots in blackpool i know of. i think it’s understandable i would have so many complex feelings about such a complex book!

[Adrian Alvarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars
I'm having so much fun with prototype publishing's catalogue and this novel is no exception. The story is fairly simple but the prose shoots off in so many unexpected and creative directions that even when I didn't care to stop and consider each chapter's dramatis personae of substances, organs, symbols, colors, hormones and chemical formulas the ride was so intoxicating that I continually had a great time. That seems to be a line running through every one of the books I've ready by this publisher. The authors are just really great hangs.

They are so much fun to read that I bristled at the completely unnecessary clarifying section at the end of this book where Palmer goes through each chapter and points out all the ways she tracked James Joyce's Ulysses. That felt like a really insecure and amateurish move. Let the work stand on its own and let the reader engage how they will engage, ie, don't be a control freak.

I do recommend this, though. For a certain type of reader (my type) this is a great summer beach read.

[Pádraic · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is great -- engaging with The Odyssey and Ulysses of course, but doing its own queer Blackpool 1999 thing, and you could happily read it without knowing anything about those two. What's keeping it from the ol' five stars is more critical theory than is to my liking, and basically a difference of opinion: Palmer (and Joyce, for that matter) take a lot of pleasure in playing around with language, and see language as an end in itself. I tend to see language as a means to an end.

But most of the experimental stuff here is successful I think, and if you disagree or find a particular bit tedious, well, it'll be over soon and we'll be on to something else, as the chapters are short and punchy and read pretty fast. Basically I was won over by how fun it is, its big openhearted enthusiasm for all the polyphonic interconnected mundanities of life. As William Blake said, for everything that lives is holy.

[Nadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

At times absolutely dizzying, I cannot pretend to have understood all of it. Yet the entire book felt so intimate, whether it be through the stream of consciousness that included equations, homages to greek mythology and TLC lyrics. Amongst every page it just explored that feeling of looking into somebody’s eyes and knowing they see you too. We were placed into the thoughts of the characters without asking to be and that can be overwhelming and messy but it’s more real than just using dialogue (although it was Chapter 4 that made me start to fall/falling/fell for this book). I want to re-read this again and write a short story inspired by it. I want to understand every moment of their 24-hours and wish it was set in my city. Gosh if it was set in my city it would top Monkey Grip. I cried at one point. This book reminds me that there is no time to be depressed and I absolutely loved it.

[Jake Ivill · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s a great story in here somewhere—hidden under all the experimental stuff and the author’s dream of being the next big literary genius. It’s like a Ulysses-style love story set in late ’90s Blackpool. Born Slippy gets name-dropped all over the place, and the love for the town really comes through.

But then it just goes completely off the rails. This one character shows up and does nothing but take up space, and from there it turns into this wild attempt to rewrite what a novel even is. You get poems mirrored across pages, scenes jumping across hundreds of years, multiple perspectives—it just loses the plot.

I’m loath to hate on experimental books. It’s a noble cause when writing a novel is hard enough. But this really needed a solid editor to cut through the mess and let the good stuff shine.

[Vikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a kaleidoscopic whirlpool of a ride, rattling you at lightning speed through 24 hours of the intertwined thoughts and feelings of its three main characters. Whizzing through the euphoric, the mundane, the tragic and the absurd, reading it feels just like riding a rollercoaster that spits you out the other end disorientated and giddy. It’s at once irreverent and intellectual, deliciously steeped in the cultural, historical and geographical milieu of late 90s Blackpool and littered with golden nuggets of literary and philosophical nods. A complex and sophisticated telling of what is ultimately a gloriously simple and timeless story of queer love blossoming among the chaos of teenhood.

[anjali swarstad · Rating 3 out of 5]

enjoyed all the bukowski/kerouac jabs given here. and i’m always for the eye roll stream of consciousness experimentation of words and language. i did enjoy that here for a while but there were certainly bits that lost me completely

the action in this is fun and i felt it happening in real time, but the rest of the drug writing gets a little murky i can’t even lie

but i appreciate the opportunity to see totally where the line is crossed and becomes annoying to read !! overall a fun little experience but the book itself is prettier than the sound of the words

[paula. · Rating 3 out of 5]

there is no difference between creating mythology and just living your fucking life

this is clever and experimental and triply and feels like every mitski song

sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but nonetheless, helen palmer is intelligent and talented

i struggle with multiple pov stories that are not equally divided, especially when one is there as a supposed main character but is clearly pushed to the background (aka i would’ve loved to see more of treesa

3.5/5

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly effective interpellation of Ulysses and The Odyssey into an extremely Y2k day in the life of three teenage British girls as they deal with the emotional fallout of a first-time queer experience. If anything, it maybe guides the reader a bit too much with the Joycean parallels, but that's a minor complaint when more writing about young people should be this brave, brainy, and overflowing with language.

[Eilidh Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel so torn on what to rate this book (2.5) This was the most stream of consciousness-ey book I’ve ever read, I have never read anything like it. I found some of the chapters truly unreadable but at the core really liked the story and the way the prose was able capture the characters feelings. I think the end synopsis explaining the connections to the odyssey would have probably helped in understanding the book.

[Colin Hogan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Initially found the originality & word play style quite interesting but eventually it become frustratingly repetitive & ultimately irritating. As an aside it does feel that if an author has to explain to readers how their story resonates with the Odyssey/Ulysses then it seems it has failed in its purpose.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

some of this i absolutely loved. sticky, uncomfortable, familiar. some of this i liked less but appreciated the intention behind - experimental, playful.

i also enjoyed the allusions to ulysses/ the odyssey. it’s nice to have read both previously & pick up on them, but not at all necessary to appreciate this book in and of itself.

would definitely recommend !

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

so fab.

all my fav things: the north-west of England, gay girls, twisty-turny prose. it’s modernist and highly abstract, deeply rooted in tiny observations that make it all seem real. so juicy, so rich. a masterpiece.

also, this book has the PERFECT dimensions for me to hold and read it comfortably as well as carry it round in my bag. the cover is also so chic.