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

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 23, 2026

Reviews

[emma]

me when i want to sound chic at a restaurant

[nicole]

There’s still time to not publish this😬

[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.

[maria ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t think from the synopsis alone that I would enjoy this book as much as I did, but I did!

Skin Contact is a book about romance, not really a romance book. It deals with themes of monogamy and non-monogamy, lost chances, second chances, unrequited crushes, family bonds, what it really means to love someone. It has a very interesting non-linear way of telling the story, changing timelines and povs as it goes on, always around the subject of love. We get to know a little bit of everyone in this story, which I really liked. I don’t think the story(ies) would’ve been as interesting if told in a traditional, chronological, single-pov way; the episodic nature of them felt more natural, sort of soap opera-ish, which my Brazilian mind adheres easily to. I read some people saying that the constant shift between povs was confusing or distracting but to me it made sense, and it made the story easier to follow actually, since I paid more intense attention to its details.

My favourite thing about the book was its nuance. There’s no right or wrong relationship, no right or wrong behaviour, no right or wrong decision. Characters get hurt and hurt, apologize and forgive, explain and confuse, but apart from a few moments of “woke discourse” (which would probably feel forced if not for the fact that real people actually do speak and think in “woke speech” nowadays lol) the book refused to give a clear perspective on what “it” believed to be the right answer. By offering many different, conflicting povs, the book remained relatively neutral, sort of a mediator in a debate among its characters that never reaches a definite conclusion, except perhaps that love is about constant communicating because love, solid as it is, is ever-changing. There’s no end point to loving; it’s not a destination one reaches but rather a path one walks on. But maybe this is just my own point of view, since I’m such a lover; the book reminded me of that nevertheless. ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

[Zoe Giles · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

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

[cursedb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a genuinely enjoyable read, mainly because I finished it in one sitting. That alone says a lot about how engaging I found it. I’ve always been interested in books that explore unconventional relationship dynamics, whether that involves open relationships or other forms of non-traditional intimacy, especially when those dynamics unfold within long-term relationships. They tend to raise interesting questions about trust, desire, jealousy, and commitment. And, honestly, these stories almost never end well. At this point, I’ve come to expect that, so I wasn’t surprised by where this one ultimately went. The ending itself felt fairly predictable, but that never bothered me. What kept me invested was seeing how the situation would gradually unravel. The tension came from watching the characters make increasingly complicated choices rather than wondering what the final outcome would be. The shifting points of view were slightly confusing at first. It took me a couple of chapters to adjust to the structure, but once I did, I actually thought it was one of the book’s strengths. Writing multiple perspectives is difficult because every voice needs to contribute something meaningful without becoming repetitive or confusing. Here, I think the author handled that challenge exceptionally well. Once I became immersed in the story, I stopped paying attention to who was narrating because every perspective added another layer to the characters and the overall narrative. Overall, it took a little time to settle into the structure, but by the third chapter I was completely hooked. Even though the destination was never much of a mystery, the journey there made the novel thoroughly enjoyable.

[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.

[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.

[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*

[gracie · Rating 1 out of 5]

You could not pay me to give a fuck about anything that happened in this book. The writing is annoying, the characters even more so, the constant pov changes does nothing for the writing and are all so similar with no distinction that they begin to bleed into each other.

The sigh of relief I let out when I turned the last page...what a mess.

[Ruby Yassen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soooo good, so JUICY, so fun and readable, and simultaneously really heartfelt and emotional. I was very invested! I think this will be a great summer read 🔥

[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.

[Kendall · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was not good I’m sorry. It was difficult to follow because there were multiple POVs that were hard to decipher what character was talking. It reminded me of Cleopatra and Frankenstein (one of the worst books I’ve ever read). And why did it have to switch from third person to first person and sometimes even second person?

This felt like a bunch of short stories mushed together into one bad book. It felt very surface level and the writing wasn’t great. The way some characters spoke was annoying. Specifically the diary entry, I assume, from one of the characters.

Also I am BEGGING authors to stop mentioning Covid in their books. Please stop!!!!

[Alyssa Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

i really did enjoy what i was reading, but unfortunately the structure and the pacing of this book was its downfall.

the blurb isn’t lying, it is about a couple who begin an open relationship, and yes, she does fall pregnant, but what this blurb also fails to tell you is that a good third of the book is littered with very loosely tied povs that physically draw you away from the page and make u think “huh, who is this”, and while some of them did actually grip me once i had an idea of who was speaking, it still couldn’t make up for the few that really served little point at all, that could’ve been woven in through using the actual two main people of our story, frances and ben.

i hated the mix of third and first. pick one and stick with it, or if you’re going to blend them, at least have it represent a narrative purpose. it felt lazy, like she chose what best suited the current chapter.

i wish this book had been all about frances and ben, the real root of the story doesn’t happen until about 150 pages in, for a just shy of 300 pages book, it was upsetting how little i felt i actually spent with our main characters.

there was definitely tender and beautiful lines woven throughout this book, just felt we could’ve cut all the filler to let these beautiful moments shine. an unfortunate 3 stars since i was hoping for so much more :(

[Grace Champagne · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5-- very much in the vein of The Late Americans or Cleopatra and Frankenstein both of which i did not love either. sorta plotless and maybe a little pseudo-intellectual, with brief good moments.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

Read in one sitting in the sunshine and picked this up after seeing it labelled as ‘the hottest, sluttiest book of the summer’.

Didn’t care for the additional POVS around Ben & Frances but I really loved the writing.

[Ajdana · Rating 2 out of 5]

naja, ich weiß nicht was ich sagen soll. ganz fatal

[Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so fucking good are you kidding me. Only critique is the chapter names are criminal (I was audio booking at work).

[Parisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautifully layered palimpsest exploring platonic and romantic love, plus a secret third thing? the story continued to grow richer and spread to encompass so much as it went on

[Sawyer Rials · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shoutout Flyleaf + Chapel Hill 🩵

[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.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frances and Ben, married and in their early thirties, decide to open up their marriage. They engage in threesomes and foursomes and cultivate individual relationships outside the marriage as well.

I was expecting a fictional deep dive into the complications related to polyamory, and there was some of that, but there were also so many tangents that the book never came fully together for me. Rather than a novel, this one functions as linked stories. We get chapters from different POVs, such as Frances’s family members and friends of the couple. But these chapters seem randomly inserted and didn’t seem to advance the core story. I didn’t dislike this book but I was frequently confused by it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Cardinal for allowing me to read an ARC of this title.

[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.

[Danielle Wraith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an advanced reader copy from Cardinal Publishing in exchange for an honest review.

Skin Contact by Elisa Faison is unlike anything I've ever read.

This book pulled me in immediately and didn't let go. It's juicy, emotional, thought-provoking, and surprisingly tender all at once. I laughed, I blushed (a lot), I felt deeply for these characters, and more than once my heart was in my throat wondering how everything was going to turn out.

The story follows Frances and Ben, a married couple who decide to open their marriage. What unfolds is a raw, messy, deeply human exploration of love, grief, desire, friendship, aging, and identity. While the premise centers on an open marriage, the novel feels less interested in making a statement and more interested in examining what it means to be a person inside a long-term relationship. Who are we when we're partnered? Who are we when we're not? And how do we continue evolving without losing ourselves, or each other?

One of my favorite aspects of the novel was how intimate it felt. Even without personal experience with an open marriage, I found myself imagining how I might react in similar situations. The book invited curiosity rather than judgment, and I appreciated being able to view the same relationships from so many different perspectives. It didn't necessarily change my mind about anything, but it definitely made me think.

The emotional layers are what stayed with me most. Beneath the drama, and there is plenty of drama, there's a thoughtful exploration of grief, longing, family dynamics, and the complicated ways we seek connection. I was incredibly invested in these characters and genuinely wanted to know what would happen to them.

My one struggle was with the multiple points of view. The story is told through several narrators, including Frances, Ben, the waitress they meet, Frances's mother, and her grandmother. At times, it wasn't immediately clear whose perspective I was reading, and it took me a while to get oriented. Once I found my footing, it became easier to follow, but the opening chapters required a little extra attention.

Overall, Skin Contact is bold, intimate, and completely addictive. It's one of those books that makes you uncomfortable in the best possible way because it's willing to ask difficult questions about relationships, desire, and what we owe ourselves versus the people we love.

[Rea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book and some of the reviews on net galley made me think I was crazy for enjoying this so much? Sometimes books with main protagonists that are unlikable/selfish get a bad rep? I just love a crazy, selfish women on a mission to eff up her life by trying out some things, in this case an open marriage.
Frances and Ben decide to open their marriage and at first this is giving off "let's spice up our marriage" vibes, but very fast you come to realized that there are deep rooted issues on why they are doing this and why it might or might not work for them long term. The main protagonist here is Frances - she comes off as selfish and self absorbed. The kind of girl that you love to hate, but you also want to be her best friend. She keeps life fun and she just does what she wants. Her husband Ben is the agreeable kind, always admired her and went along with everything she has wanted. I felt torn between thinking he just really understands her vs. his personality is very submissive.

Every other chapter in the book is told from someone else's POV and this is what a lot of people took issue with. I read a lot of reviews that found the switch confusing, but I found it very entertaining. I felt like we were really understanding how Frances was perceived in some of these chapters, what her upbringing was like in others and then in some, we don't necessarily get a direct insight into her life, but more of a reflection/comparison on the fleeting nature of girlhood.

There was a lot of underlying themes in the book. It's not the kind of book where the message is spelled out for you. You find your own meaning within this story. That can be grief, marriage, birth, children, desire etc etc.
Also, the cover of this book and the title are truly 5/5 starts. I will be buying the physical copy just for the cover art. I loved how if you really dissect this book at the heart of it is this idea that physical touch makes us feel alive and wanted.

I love books without a morality clause. I love books where we get to ponder the what ifs of our lives and to me this is what Skin Contact is about.

Thank you NetGalley & Grand Central Publishing for the opportunity to read this book -

[Brooke · Rating 4 out of 5]

★★★★

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

There's a particular kind of courage in writing about desire without a verdict — and that's exactly what Elisa Faison pulls off in her debut. *Skin Contact* isn't interested in telling you how to feel about open marriage. It just puts human want on the page and lets it breathe. That restraint is rarer than it sounds, and it's what makes this book linger.

Frances and Ben are thirty-two, married, and quietly falling apart in ways neither of them fully understands yet. When Frances suggests opening the marriage after her mother's death, it reads less like a lifestyle choice and more like a woman reaching for proof that she's still alive. Faison never corrects her for it. She never corrects anyone, really — and that non-judgment is the whole engine of the novel.

What keeps the story from feeling like a single talking head is the way it's told. Frances narrates in close, sometimes suffocating first person — she's funny, self-aware, selfish, and completely compelling. Ben gets his own chapters, and he's the quiet revelation: a philosophy professor who approached polyamory through books and theory, only to be completely undone by actual feeling. Lily, a photographer tangled up in their orbit, watches the marriage from the outside with a longing she can only express through a camera lens — her sections have a visual, almost cinematic quality that stands apart from everyone else's. And then there are Rose and Gina, Frances's mother and grandmother, whose fragmented diary-like "Scraps" chapters ground the whole contemporary story inside a longer lineage of women who wanted things and had no language for it.

That's the move Faison makes that I keep thinking about: Frances's desire doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists in a bloodline.

Yes, the shifting perspectives take some adjusting to early on. But once you find your footing, the structure starts to feel intentional in the best way — the form mirrors the theme. A porous, multi-voiced novel about a porous, outward-facing marriage. It earns it.

This is a book about what it means to want, to be witnessed, and to discover you're larger than you thought. A genuinely impressive debut.

[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