Skin Contact

by Elisa Faison

Unmoored by her mother's sudden death, Frances has never felt so diminished, or so old. She's painfully aware that strangers no longer look at her the same way - and that she's now, at thirty-two, older than the great aunt for whom she was named, who was killed in the seventies under mysterious circumstances involving an extramarital affair.

Her husband, Ben, will do anything to help Frances regain her vivacity and sense of purpose. So when Frances suggests that they open their marriage, Ben complies.

Over the next two years, they explore their sexualities and latent kinks; they navigate jealousy, betrayal, desire, and obsession; they defend their choices - and their new identities - to confused friends. They do all of this together, as a team. But when Ben finds himself falling in love with another woman, just as Frances realizes she's ready to settle down and have a baby, they are forced to confront the consequences of their experiment.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Adult, Queer, LGBT, Romance

304 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication June 23, 2026

Reviews

[nicole]

There’s still time to not publish this😬

[Zoe Giles · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

one of my favourite lit fics I’ve read in a long time

[Vmndetta ᛑᛗᛛ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sorry, but I kinda didn't like the writing. From the start, the book feels a bit unfocused, like it keeps circling around feelings and small moments about 'open marriage' instead of really digging into the main problem. The story promises big emotional conflicts, but a lot of the time it feels distracted.

The first three chapters also really threw me off. Chapter one uses I, chapter two uses we, and chapter three suddenly switches to third person. I honestly don't know what the point of that was, especially since they're still the same characters. It felt unnecessary and confusing, not meaningful.

I also felt like the way the characters speak is kind of weird. It's like they just say whatever pops into their heads with no filter. It comes off childish, and it kept pulling me out of the story instead of pulling me in. Overall, the idea is interesting, but the execution didn't work for me.

[Chelsea Knowles · Rating 2 out of 5]

*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance reader copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.*

Skin Contact follows Frances who at age thirty-two decides to open her marriage. Her husband, Ben agrees because he will do anything to make Frances happy and she has really been struggling after the death of her mother which has led to a lack of purpose in her life. They meet a waitress at a restaurant, end up giving her their number and arrange to meet her. This is the first time they have opened their marriage and over the next two years they get on the dating apps and start to meet people together. Frances falls in love with many people but it isn’t until Ben reconnects with a woman and falls in love with her that they have to confront what they have been doing and decide how their future will look especially as Frances wants a baby.

Unfortunately, this just didn’t work for me, mainly because of the way this book is written. It is told from multiple POV’s such as Frances, Ben, the waitress they meet up with, Frances’ mother and grandmother. It is not clear whose point of view it is and it took awhile for me to work out who was who. This meant the narrative was significantly disrupted and this would have been much better if it was told from Frances’ POV particularly as so much of Frances’ story is about grief after the death of her mother. As I didn’t like the way this is written that meant I struggled to enjoy the story as I kept loosing interest when the POV switched. There were some interesting moments as Frances and Ben explored their open marriage but this just felt a little uninspired and due to the POV’s this didn’t give much insight into an open marriage. I think it was a very strange choice to write the book this way but this will work for some readers so I think it’s worth a read if you like multiple POV’s and short story collections.

[Eileen Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5⭐

this book was unlike ANYTHING i’ve ever read!! istg it felt like i was reading about real people!!! it follows a married couple, Frances and Ben who decide to open their marriage👀 their journey is raw and messy af. it's full of all the ups and downs of them trying to make it work but also trying to figure out wtf they want and who they are as adults(mostly the fmc tho😅) ngl, i was spiraling SO many times because this book did NOT lack drama🤣 my heart was in my throat wondering how it was gonna end!!! after finishing it... i want more!! this author's writing is kinda addictive and i will definitely be checking out her future books🤭🙌🏻

[Patty Ramirez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could barely put this book down once I started it. I've read novels about open marriages before and I must say that this is the one that has hooked me the most!

That being said, there were a couple of chapters that dealt with the people surrounding Ben and Frances that to me just felt like filler and were a bit confusing when it came to connecting to the story.

But, do not skip this one, this story is worth it!

Thank you to Cardinal and the author for providing a free copy of this book through NetGalley.

[Remi]

honestly, i'm super curious about open marriages

*thank you to Cardinal for the ARC*

[Ely Ehly]

Elisa Faison’s skin contact is an Impressively intimate and visceral debut exploring a couples decision to introduce polyamory into their marriage. Throughout the novel, Frances and Ben’s relationship felt so tangible to me that at times I felt as if I was gossiping with a friend rather than reading a book. The prose and characterizations were inviting and descriptive.

For the majority of my reading experience, I could not determine if Faison was advocating for or cautioning against polyamory. This was a component of the book I greatly appreciate, because it felt as if the impact of the open marriage on Frances, Ben, and their relationships was fully explored. Some plot lines felt ambitious and intriguing, but left me either wanting more or less. Notably I was left wanting more between Annie & Lily’s relationship as well as Izzy’s feeling for Frances.

Overall, Elisa Faison’s debut was intriguing and fascinating, leaving me excited to see what she does next.

Thank you to Grand Central Publishing, NetGalley, and the author for the ARC.

[Ava F · Rating 2 out of 5]

ARC copy March 2026: Every couple years, a trendy new novel about open marriage drops and “Skin Contact” is the one for 2026. While I was initially drawn in, this book quickly fell flat. Every other chapter or so focuses on a character outside of the main couple, each less relevant than the last. Several of the chapters were originally published as short stories, and they read like it: they feel completely disconnected from the main narrative. Overall, I found this book to be ambitious but ultimately disappointing.

[Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting premise - one would think - that turned out to be basically interconnected short stories with one central couple. As a result it was hard for me to latch on to what was going on and I was bummed it wasn’t the erotic-ish novel I thought I was going to read! The writing was also a little simplistic at times which really stood out when you’d be introduced to a new character and have to explain how they were related to the main couple.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

What the House Cannot Keep
In Elisa Faison’s “Skin Contact,” marriage, maternity, grief, and desire leak through the walls of domestic life, turning intimacy into a question not of purity but of possession, witness, and the bodies that cannot quite contain what they love.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 15th, 2026


A house under strain: lamp-light climbs the chimney while the room tries, and fails, to keep its unrest contained.

A house can turn uncanny for embarrassingly practical reasons. A smell in the chimney. A scratch in the wall. Papers breeding on the coffee table. Plates left in the sink overnight by someone who once could not have slept with them there. In Elisa Faison’s “Skin Contact,” domestic disorder is never merely domestic. It is symptom, accusation, omen and, now and then, a joke at somebody’s expense. A woman wakes to what sounds like her dead mother downstairs, keeping the house as she once did, only to discover that the noise is not haunting but bats clacking in the chimney. The correction is funny, foul and exact. Faison keeps staging intimacy in the wrong costume, at the wrong hour, with the wrong body attached. She is less interested in whether love repairs fracture than in the uglier fact that love – erotic, maternal, filial, domestic – exposes how leaky, unstable and finally unkeepable the self already is.

Its domestic machinery is unmistakably of the moment: a marriage opened outward, a husband in love elsewhere, a pregnancy under pressure, a miscarriage, a body refusing the script, a house no longer quite hers. Frances, the novel’s governing mind, is married to Ben, a philosophy professor whose openness to polyamory once seemed tender and flattering, then practical, then rather less innocent than either of them wanted to admit. Frances has loved outside the marriage before. She fell hard for a woman named Celeste, dated other women after that, and learned that attraction is unreliable, fidelity unstable and comparison a terrible hobby. Now she is pregnant, frightened, untidy in a way that alarms her more than it should, and increasingly aware that Ben’s attachment to his girlfriend, Allison, has redrawn the floor plan of her life. The house is full of bats. The chimney smells rancid. The fireplace appears scratched. Ben’s lecture notes on horror and abjection begin to read less like academic scraps than like messages from a husband who has moved slightly out of frame.

A lesser book would have taken that setup, nodded gravely, and mistaken the nod for insight. Faison wants something messier than topic and less obedient than theme. “Skin Contact” has no interest in refereeing polyamory. It is after the moment when the words people use to steady themselves – wife, mother, lover, friend, home, body, self – stop acting like containers and start behaving like seams. Pregnancy, here, is not a soft-focus miracle. It is an impossible condition: there is both a baby and not yet a baby, both a self and a me that is not quite me. Frances, reading through Ben’s notes on Julia Kristeva, Eugene Thacker and gothic domestic space while half-ghostwriting a pop history of the midcentury kitchen, is exactly the kind of person who can think herself into clarity and back out of it before lunch. Faison knows how funny such a mind can be. She knows its misery, too. Theory in this novel is not decorative trim. It is one more way a frightened consciousness tries to stack the plates.

Then the plates go crashing. Allison comes to dinner while Ben is away at a conference. Frances, already braced against the ordeal of being alone with the woman her husband loves, is trying to be gracious, adult, porous, all the little civic virtues of enlightened coupling. Instead she begins to miscarry in the bathroom. Here the novel stops circling and strikes bone. Allison, who could have remained a tidy emblem – rival, trespasser, modern complication – becomes the person at eye level with the blood. She kneels. She knows what to do. She wipes Frances’s face, tells her to put on a pad, tells her to call Ben later, tells her to see the doctor tomorrow, tells her to drink a glass of wine now. The “other woman” becomes the primary witness to the most private event imaginable. Faison refuses the cheap halo. She lets the fact of care stand there in all its awkward authority. Care is not owned by relationship status. It arrives where it arrives, often to the wrong person’s embarrassment.

That bathroom scene clarifies the sore nerve the book keeps touching. “Skin Contact” is about who gets to witness and therefore partly possess another person’s crisis. Pregnancy promises the most intimate kind of possession – another life literally inside the body – and then flips into its opposite. Miscarriage, in Frances’s account, is devastating partly because it is so stubbornly unglamorous. The blood is not cinematic. The tissue is small, dark, disappointing. Her grief comes mixed with fury, shame, self-pity and a childish outrage at having something happen to her that she did not order. Faison is right not to purify that feeling into noble loss. Frances is not improved by suffering. She is made rawer, stranger to herself, and in need of being held, cleaned, instructed.

Faison is especially good on humiliation’s afterlife. She writes flexible, medium-length sentences that can carry thought, revulsion, comedy and longing in one motion. Her diction slips easily between academic language, bodily bluntness, domestic detail and a plaintive idiom of need. That last register matters. Adults in this book do not stop becoming infantile when frightened or bereft. They simply acquire better vocabularies with which to disguise it. Frances can think in terms of abjection and still want, with heartbreaking simplicity, to be held, soothed, chosen and kept. Faison’s sentences behave as if they know those states are not contradictory. The body is where high-minded theories go to get embarrassed. Blood, milk, hair, clutter, food, stale smells, breast pumps, badly arranged throw pillows – this is a novel full of substances that refuse to stay in bounds. Even its symbols first arrive as domestic squatters. The bats work because they are disgusting and inconvenient before they become interpretable.

She is just as good at the smaller comic disgraces that keep the book from mistaking severity for depth. A crudité tray is memorably described as the cheese plate’s dumb CrossFit boyfriend. Breast milk tasted after a pumping session comes off like a limited-edition Four Loko. A woman trying to remain open-minded about her husband’s girlfriend finds herself wondering instead whether the girlfriend’s ear piercings make oral sex logistically awkward. The jokes matter not as relief but as proof. Suffering does not make these people noble. It mostly makes them vain, petty, funny and, in flashes, painfully sincere.

Faison opens a back door into a longer weather pattern with “Scraps,” diary-like fragments from an earlier generation centered on a woman who works at a domestic violence shelter, raises a daughter named Franny, and thinks in clipped notes, private statistics and little counters to the stories men tell about what happens in the home. These pages do more than supply ancestry. They change the scale. What first appears to be a specifically contemporary instability – the open marriage, the girlfriend, the queer domestic arrangement, the language of boundaries and selfhood – is placed against a longer family climate in which women have always had to manage danger, dependence, secrecy and the endless work of making houses livable. Domestic life in “Skin Contact” is not newly fraught. What changes is the language, not the injury. The present has new vocabularies, not new wounds.

Then Lily comes back into view, camera raised, looking at the married pair from the angle of longing rather than doctrine. A photographer and former participant in an earlier threesome with Ben and Frances, she sharpens the book by seeing them not as they understand themselves but as erotic objects, parental surrogates, aspirational adults and surfaces onto which a lonely younger woman projects all kinds of hunger. Her camera is a shield and a lure at once. She wants to capture essence; what she keeps finding is her own longing. Her return to Frances in the later sections could have felt mechanically triangular. Instead it becomes one of the book’s sharpest insights into belated desire. What draws Lily back is not novelty but repetition, delay, and the hope that she might, this time, be called.

The novel is overfull on purpose. Its repeat offense is that it sometimes makes a second explanatory pass after the scene has already landed. Faison is so alert to her own ideas – self and other, house and psyche, motherhood as invasion, love as possession, care as distributed rather than owned – that she occasionally confirms, in theory, what her pages have already established in blood, clutter or touch. Lists, especially, are double-edged here. They can be funny, defensive and psychologically exact, a way of dramatizing a mind trying to inventory its own instability. They can also flatten ambiguity by converting felt contradiction into named contradiction. More than once, an insight arrives in milk, mess or touch, only to return in concept and then in summary. The novel is strongest when it trusts the scene to do the thinking.

Still, that recurrent overexplanation is mostly the price of real ambition rather than fake seriousness. The references are not there to make the room look smarter. “Skin Contact” is genuinely trying to think through why contemporary people, armed with all the right language about openness, autonomy and boundaries, still wound one another in such old ways. It passes through today’s approved language about non-monogamy, motherhood and domestic labor without shrinking to the size of any of it. It reads less like a response than a diagnosis. What the novel knows, perhaps better than its characters do, is that neither traditional coupledom nor enlightened arrangement can solve the older problem beneath them: intimacy itself involves dependence, trespass and interpretive overreach from which no amount of right language can fully protect us.

Comparisons are briefly useful, then they start sanding away the grain. There are stretches of adult erotic restlessness that may remind some readers of Miranda July’s “All Fours,” and passages of maternal disillusion that echo, in a looser and wetter key, Rachel Cusk’s “A Life’s Work.” There is also something of Maggie Nelson’s interest in family, theory and embodiment. But Faison is less coolly designed than July, less essayistically pared than Cusk, less citationally hybrid than Nelson. She is more bodily, more cluttered, more at home in the sink.

It comes most fully alive when it refuses to let care turn into a sentimental synonym for goodness. Care here is exhausting, erotic, competitive, competent, infantilizing, displaced and sometimes the only thing standing between a person and incoherence. Ben wants Frances, loves her, fails her, remains home to her. Allison threatens the marriage and saves the night. Lily wants to be seen, parented and desired in one impossible package. The women in the archive want to protect daughters from what they themselves could not escape. Nobody gets to occupy a role without stain. That refusal gives the novel its hardest life.

Even when it slackens, it keeps returning to the same bruise: the wish to keep what cannot be kept. A child. A lover. A memory. A version of the home. A version of the self. The trouble is both smaller and nastier than the book’s social topic. Intimacy makes the fantasy, for a minute, feel inevitable. Frances wants to keep what enters her body. Lily wants to preserve feeling through images. The mother in the archive wants to save her daughter from inherited harm. Everyone is tidying, archiving, nursing, arranging, naming, trying to hold what is already changing form.

That is why the book’s best image may be the bats – those false hauntings, those foul domestic squatters, those baby creatures no one can quite bear to evict at the wrong time. After the miscarriage, Frances and Allison blast them out of the chimney with light and noise, then stand outside with wine in their hands and watch them circle up into the dark. Nothing is solved, least of all the house. The bats are not gone for good. The dishes will still be in the sink in the morning. But for one raw, cracked little moment the air fills with what the house could not keep. My final rating: 91/100, which translates to 5/5 stars on Goodreads – not because the novel is flawless, but because it is serious enough to argue with and the kind of book whose scratch marks show up later in the light.


Early compositional trials testing how the fireplace, figure, and intrusive beam could hold the novel’s domestic pressure in balance.


The graphite skeleton of the room, where containment, negative space, and emotional architecture first begin to take shape.


The first washes stain the page with rust, shadow, and sour light, letting the room’s unease emerge before detail.


A restrained palette study translating the cover’s reds, ochres, greens, and acid yellows into the emotional chemistry of the painting.

All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.

[Jillian Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the surface, it’s about open marriage, but for me, it hit more as a story about grief. It’s raw, intimate, and kind of sexy, following a woman figuring out her mom’s death, her marriage, her desires, and who she is now.

The writing is honest, sometimes uncomfortably so, and while the shifting perspectives threw me off a bit, it still drew me in. Thoughtful and open, it’s more than it seems, though I wish it lingered a little longer in spots.

Thanks to Grand Central and NetGalley for the ARC.

[Quill (thecriticalreader) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars

A mixture of a novel and connected short stories that probe the bounds of human relationships in all their forms.

This book’s description is somewhat misleading. It is technically a novel about a couple in their thirties, Ben and Francis, who decide to open up their marriage. But the majority of the book consists of short stories from the perspectives of people in Ben and Frances’ orbit—their friends, acquaintances, friends of friends, family, etc. Many of these short stories have little, if anything, to do with the “main” story.

In another book, this approach might be obnoxious. But I found these frequent forays into different perspectives welcome—probably because the main plotline, frankly, wasn’t terribly interesting. I didn’t hate Ben and Frances’s storyline, but it was a bit stale: two white, somewhat bland middle-class thirty-somethings decide to explore ethical non-monogamy. Yawn. I probably would have disliked this book if constrained to their perspectives. But I loved the short stories interspersed; I found they lent greater texture to the themes and characters in the main storyline.

Skin Contact explores non-monogamy, but it’s just as much about grief, motherhood, and female friendships. Faison doesn’t seem particularly interested in skewering or celebrating polyamory (although the book does ultimately portray it in a positive light), but rather in exploring how all the other types of human relationships can be just as messy, mundane, exciting, frustrating, and beautiful as polyamorous ones. The characters in the novel and the related stories hurt each other, but they always choose to move forward in ways that are brave and tender rather than dwelling in hurt and anger.

The ending was a bit weak, but I liked inhabiting the universe of characters we get to meet in this novel. It won’t be for everyone due to its unconventional structure, but I recommend it for literary fiction lovers.

Thank you to Netgalley and Grand Central Publishing for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Trigger Warnings: Pregnancy, miscarriage, grief

[Drea Warner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Skin Contact by Elisa Faison is an intimate and thought-provoking novel that explores grief, identity, and the shifting boundaries of modern relationships. After the sudden death of her mother, Frances feels unmoored from the life she once knew. At thirty-two, she becomes acutely aware of time, aging, and the haunting legacy of her great aunt—whose mysterious death decades earlier lingers in the background of her thoughts.

In an attempt to reclaim a sense of vitality and control, Frances suggests opening her marriage to her husband, Ben. What begins as an experiment in freedom and self-discovery gradually evolves into something far more complicated. Over the course of two years, the couple navigates jealousy, desire, emotional vulnerability, and the evolving definitions of love and commitment.

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its willingness to examine uncomfortable truths about relationships. The characters are flawed and deeply human, making decisions that are messy, complicated, and sometimes painful. When Ben finds himself falling in love with another woman at the same time Frances begins reconsidering what she truly wants, particularly the possibility of starting a family, the emotional stakes become impossible to ignore.

Faison approaches themes of sexuality, autonomy, and partnership with nuance and sensitivity. Rather than sensationalizing the open marriage dynamic, the story thoughtfully explores the psychological and emotional consequences of redefining intimacy.

Overall, Skin Contact is a reflective, character-driven novel about grief, transformation, and the risks that come with trying to rediscover oneself. Readers who enjoy complex relationship dramas and introspective literary fiction will find plenty to contemplate here.

[Amanda Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was such an interesting read. I wanted to give it more stars, but ultimately, I think there were more things I disliked versus those that I liked. Let me start with the good stuff. The deep emotional connection linking the reader to each character felt as real as being inside their head. It is an intimate bond and fascinating to explore as each of the characters navigate their relationships between lovers, friends, and family.

What I didn't care for was the multiple narrators who left me confused as I tried to figure out who each one was and how they were related to the main characters. There is another side story about family that felt out of place and wasn't necessary to further the story (read the first paragraph of the synopsis for reference). It didn't make sense to have it in there, especially in sporadic chapters throughout the book. Then there were the motives. We never learn the 'why' behind any of this. We don't hear the conversations that preclude the decision to open a marriage. While the reader's experience with the characters is rich and complex, the characters interactions with one another are superficial and condensed. There is a love story that we are told about, but we don't get to experience it for ourselves so it's hard to understand the dynamic between husband and wife and their partner.

If you're curious about polyamory, this book likely won't answer any of your questions. It's about one couples relationship and how their choices effect the other relationships around them. This story is unique to them and does not include or describe most of the traditional boundaries set by couples who live the lifestyle.

Overall, a good book. Not smutty, almost clinical, actually. Get out of your comfort zone and give it a read.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can definitely see why there's buzz about this book as it's pretty bold in its exploration of the opening up of a loving marriage and the consequent experience of polyamory. However, for me, the literary qualities weren't really there: the writing is serviceable and a bit soggy, and didn't offer the richness, sharpness and density of prose that would have caught my attention more, and I felt like the characterisation was a bit mechanical. Frances is given more emotional space than Ben, but the implication that her underlying grief at her mother's death was the driving force behind their marital experimentation felt a bit pat and unnuanced.

I can see there's a bit of an authorial quandary, too, about how to describe sex scenes: too 'erotic' and the book tips into porn; but withholding or glossing over them means the book doesn't actually go to the heart of its topic and I felt that to be the case at times here.

I can see that the book itself is trying out ways to tell its story: the floating commentary from Frances and Ben's friends, for example, are a sort of Greek chorus that offer up a gamut of views on their decisions. And I appreciated, too, that the tone of the book remains unjudgmental.

In summary, then, this is definitely worth reading: for this reader, though, while I found the content fascinating, the mode of telling and writing style perhaps didn't involve me to the extent I would have liked. All the same, I like the way this book embraces rounded sexualities and thinks about modes of being beyond the bourgeois and traditional.

Many thanks to Hodder and Stoughton for an ARC via NetGalley

[Briana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley, Grand Central Publishing, and Cardinal for the eARC of Skin Contact by Elisa Faison in exchange for an honest review. I hate to rate a book I received as an ARC so low, but I am super ambivalent about it. I understand where the author was going with this, but it was just kind of middle-of-the-road for me. To put it simply, a couple has decided to open their marriage before settling down and having kids. I don't know if my concept of age is just stunted, but I felt like they were way too young to be feeling like this in their marriage. They are in their early-30s, it's not like they're in their 40s or 50s. I get it, though, your 30s are a weird time because you're not quite the young adult anymore, but you're also still in the early stages of adulthood. I feel that as I'm also in my early-30s... maybe it's because I'm unmarried right now. I just don't see it for this couple. There are some fun moments, and this book is a smooth read for the most part. What frustrated me the most was that I'd settle into a point of view, and then it would switch to another random character. Anyway, this just didn't work for me, but I thought it was funny, raw, and kind of endearing. I didn't hate the husband, which I usually tend to do when it comes to stories about open marriages or polyamory. The couple reminded me of Ethan and Harper from season two of The White Lotus. While this isn't for me, I would recommend it to others.

[inapileofyarnandbooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was honestly confused by this book. The premise sounded really interesting, and so it was... I enjoyed reading about frances and ben's relationship and seeing how they began to navigate nonmonogamy. The problem is that half the book isn't about that? There's inexplicably a bunch of chapters inbetween from random different people's perspectives, some of which aren't even in the present day? Everytime it happened it took me half the chapter to figure out who we were with and what was going on, I'd just about start caring about this new random character, and then the chapter would be done and we'd never hear from them again. I am genuinely completely confused by this choice. I kept reading because I assumed it would all come together in the end, but it just didn't? And by that I don't mean that the author didn't bring it together well, I mean the author didn't make any attempt to bring it together at all?

I would have liked this book a LOT more if it just focused on frances and ben and their relationships (with each other and with other people) and went deeper into that.

Thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review

[Cookie Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a bit to get through this one and I maybe would have liked it more with solid time to read? Can’t honestly say. However, there were some positives here. The looser structure made it easier to digest the subject matter and at different points, other people besides the initial MMC/FMC were the focus so you got a “break” from them. However, this read like an amalgamation of stories and wasn’t as cohesive as I would have liked. I was confused at times on who the chapter was focusing on and couldn’t really get back to where it was supposed to tie in. Even still, there was some appreciation to the liberation they were finding that was centered in much of the story and characters really going after what they want without losing themselves for others. Inner turmoil did seem realistic so that was also a positive. I like when I read certain genres that reactions and how things are handled are believable.

[ct lydon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmm, I have thoughts on this. It felt like we had a lot of things happening at once, folks. I was looking for this book to not be the "we have opened our marriage and now we have a bunch of issues." That feels kind of over done at this point, it would have been nice to see how opening their marriage caused more positive feelings versus conflict. Felt a little cliche.

Sometimes there were random chapters that felt like fillers, and I could truly not tell you who those people were. It took like a solid five minutes to go back in my mind to be like, "oh, yeah! that person was mentioned once 100 pages ago."

It was a solid book, interesting topic and I felt it kept my attention. A little all over the place at times.

Thanks to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for this ARC copy!

[Ryan Brandenburg · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of this book piqued my interest, but unfortunately, the writing and format didn’t work for me.

The central narrative revolved around Frances and Ben’s relationship, which was intriguing. It delves into Frances’ grief following her mother’s death and how it impacts her romantic relationship with her husband. However, once I would become settled into their storyline, the author would abruptly introduce snippets of other characters’ narratives, causing me to lose interest.

Overall, the writing felt disjointed, which might be intentional given the story’s chaotic nature. The alternating storylines eventually converge at the end, but by that point, I didn’t really care anymore.

Thank you to NetGalley the publisher, Cardinal, for the advance copy of this book that releases on June 23, 2026. I wish it had been a better fit for me!

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skin Contact is sort of a character study of a couple who decides to open up their marriage, as seen through interconnected short stories about the couple themselves and also narrated by their family, friends, and acquaintances. You see how their decision and actions reverberate through their community, and a little bit about where it stemmed from. This is not a linear narrative, and I feel that the description of this book is a bit misleading in that regard.

I don’t have too many thoughts on this one way or the other. I feel like it could have been edgier, but overall I liked it and thought it was fine. I actually think the point of the book was to show that polyamory can be very mundane rather than always being this crazy and radical choice many see it as. But - the choppy chapters also seem to mirror the turbulence of an open marriage.

[Pamela Jo Mason · Rating 3 out of 5]

After France’s mother dies, she approaches husband Ben with the idea of on Open Marriage. Certainly a unique way to deal with grief, for sure. As they delve into these relationships and connections together and separately, the focus slowly returns to the relationship between Frances and Ben, and how they move forward, or not, after an experiment that maybe wasn’t supposed to be freeing and enlightening and fun, but could be destructive and foolhardy.

Thank you to the authors, publishers and Goodreads for giving me the opportunity to read and review 😊 Thank you for the Advanced Readers Copy and trusting me with your words! 💕Disclaimer - I received this book as a Goodreads giveaway

[Stephanie (aka WW) · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5 stars) This book was compellingly readable, and I felt like the subject of open marriage/polyamory was handled in a very realistic and novel way. The alternative POVs threw me a little, especially since they skipped in time as well as in person. They added flavor to what would otherwise have been a rather one-note story, however, so in that respect, they were appreciated. There is a moderate degree of spice to the story – not surprising with the focus on sex – but it was tastefully done.

Much thanks to NetGalley and Cardinal publishing for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was captivated by this book from page 1. It's such an intimate look at what it feels like to be inside of a marriage, navigating growing older, friendships, and intimacy. I loved being able to look at the same marriage and relationships through so many perspectives. I especially loved the chapter with the bats in the fireplace. Five stars - a must read for anyone who loves people and character-driven fiction. I also laughed out loud several times - "what do I quiero?" in particular was a line that made me LOL.

[Ellen Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so addicting that I read it in one sitting. It explores a couple who recently opened their marriage and how it affects their relationship and the friendships around them. The character we meet along the way are fascinating. This book is relatable and realistic and shows the good and the bad comes from their decision. I felt like I was right there watching it all unfold. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a market full of novels with protagonists you're meant to hate, Skin Contact offers characters that, while they may hurt each other, are trying. Trying to love each other and themselves at the same time and ultimately trying to create a life that works for them that challenges both them and the reader. This novel is compassionate, hungry, brutally honest, tender, heartbreaking and endearing all at the same time.

[Stephanie Peterman · Rating 3 out of 5]

an interesting take on polyamory, though the frequent shifts in POV without warning or context got old pretty quickly – i found myself struggling to get my footing with each new chapter to figure out who was who and how they were related to one another's stories. that said, Skin Contact had some great, real dialogue and unvarnished characters that i found appealing.

thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Tess · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is honestly a bit of a mess. I so wanted to love it, because the first chapter is super strong and I was into the characters, but then the POV jumps around too much, and timelines change, and more characters are introduced and I just simply couldn’t keep track of it all and it made me not care about what happened anymore because I couldn’t follow the story or the throughline. An interested premise but the execution just lacked too much to find it enjoyable.

[Rachael Perrin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book!!! Extremely compelling and raw portrayal of love, friendship, grief, and getting to know oneself. Her writing is a masterclass in exploring the complexity of the human experience - it is bravely vulnerable, boldly tender, and sharply funny. It really captured the essence of what makes a book resonate deeply—the interplay of emotion, humor, and honesty. This one will stick with me!