Literacy 2025: Book 13: Bloom

Book
Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson

Synopsis
After a betrayal and break-up, Ro moves back to her home state of Georgia to start her dream job as an assistant professor of literature in Athens. One day while at a farmer’s market wishing for something magical to happen in her life, she meets the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen, selling cupcakes and hand-made soaps and candles from a stall. The two hit it off immediately, and Ro quickly becomes intrigued with the idea of finding everything that’s been missing from her relationships with men, and completely infatuated with someone who seems to be naturally good at everything.

Notes
At the risk of stating the obvious, lesbian romances don’t typically give me anything to work with. So I was surprised as anyone to find myself almost squealing in the first chapters of this book, as Dawson somehow perfectly captures the thrilling feeling of falling hard for someone.

It’s that electrified sense of being simultaneously hyper-self-aware and wary of going too far, but also emboldened by new opportunity. We hear every one of Ro’s thoughts as she goes through all of the stages of a new romance, looking for signs that the attraction is mutual, tamping down sparks of unwarranted jealousy, making sure she’s not falling into patterns of obsessive behavior but then again who’s to say what’s obsessive and what’s perfectly healthy?

I especially love how Ro’s inner monologue hones in on specific phrases and facial expressions in her short exchanges with Ash. It reminded me of when I’ve been crushing hard on someone, and I could leave the briefest, most mundane conversations fully convinced that we’d just engaged in the most sparkling banter.

And because there’s no attempt to hide the premise that this is a horror story, it reads simultaneously like charming romance and suspense thriller. The writing itself gives no hints and definitely no winks to the reader; it is thoroughly the story of a smart, modern woman trying to navigate her way through feelings she’s never felt before. We’re listening to Ro making perfectly understandable and even intelligent choices at the same time we’re looking for all the warning signs and red flags that she’s blissfully blind to. Everything she describes as quaint or charming seems like it could be turned into something ominous and terrifying. The feeling of excitement and danger that comes from first kisses and first sexual experiences is something the reader feels viscerally, because we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop and things to turn horribly dark.

The book is short, but it’s not slight so much as mercifully succinct. It’s also surprisingly funny in places, and it’s enjoyable to read a character in a horror story actually being smart, even when she doesn’t always have her wits about her. And even though we spend the entirety of the novella inside Ro’s mind, the worst moments still maintain the distance of fiction, reminding the reader that this is intended to be a fun horror story.

For other squeamish readers: the gruesome stuff is implied more than fully described, and it never felt as torturous as the other books I’ve seen it compared to. Still, I advise sensitive readers to check for content warnings available online. I don’t want to give anything away here, because a lot of the excitement for me came from having no specific idea how dark the story was going to get.

Verdict
I loved it. It’s the horror-story premise of “don’t go into that door!” played out as a story of romantic infatuation that’s clever, smart, genuinely charming, and embarrassingly (but also delightfully) familiar.