This Is Between Us

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Average customer rating 4.8 (6 comments)

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This is the kind of book we should encode into sounds and shoot out to space for the aliens to pick up and understand who we are better. If we want to be honest with the aliens. So real and honest and observant and human, there's no easy arcs or sentiments here, but muddled, at-times cathartic cataloguings of the first five years in the first significant relationship for a mid-to-late thirties working class man and woman since their divorces. Each have a kid around ten that they bring into the relationship, along with their confusions from the last relationship, and ongoing confusions about how to be a person.

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I just finished This is Between Us and I LOOOOOOOOOOVVVVVVEEEED it. Every spare moment I had the last three days was spent utterly absorbed in it. Kevin Sampsell gifts us with vignettes so utterly relatable (even when they're not) because his characters are so unabashedly HUMAN. I completely admire his organization, flashing us to moments in the past which provide depth and relevance we didn't even know we were missing. Sometimes, the imagery was so beautiful I re-read portions over and over just to soak them up. I'm recommending this book to anyone who's ever loved anything or anyone.

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I read Kevin Sampsell’s This Is Between Us in two days, and I’m surprised it took me that long, honestly. Kevin Sampsell’s writing kept me up all night, and I eventually fell asleep with the book in my hand, not wanting to close it. Told in a series of vignettes, This is Between Us chronicles the relationship of a man and woman over five years, from their first days together to their times apart, and back again. Sampsell captures all the ins and outs of this relationship in a way that feels both uniquely special to the characters, as well as universally familiar to the reader. Reading this book was like a love affair in and of itself, but also felt like a retrospective of past relationships. Even though the characters in the book are older than myself and at different stages in life (divorced, with kids), their daily interactions are comparable to my own (23 year old college graduate). It is a book that I recommend to everyone�"my girlfriends, my parents, my younger brother. Just lovely!

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There is nothing slow about getting to know This is Between Us. One moment it is foreign, and the next you are dunked full body and naked into freezing water with the characters. The narrator is entirely frank and unmediated: sometimes I hated him and oftentimes I was just as baffled as he was by his partner and kids. Having these polarizing experiences with the narrator made me love the book even more. He doesn’t try to win you over like I sometimes feel characters are in books. But part of what makes this book so great is the episodic style. The vignettes are so easily accessible and so very personal because they are not contextualized in any greater narrative. What remains with me days after finishing the book, however, is how much this portrait of a relationship is based in the physical. Even when the couple is apart their interactions are rooted in their physical connection: touching a tree together, the feeling of the phone on his chest as her thoughts flow out of her head, riding a cow together in Sandy. The ending is just as simple and frank as the rest of the book: the narrator simply stops for a moment to breathe. There is no triumphant feeling of having witnessed something happen when you close the book. It is more simple and beautiful than that. It is the feeling that for a brief while your life overlapped with the characters’, and that’s that.

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Devoured this book in a night--it combines guilty, voyeuristic pleasure with great prose. You ride in the narrator's head through the beginning of a relationship, its near dissolution and ultimate tenderness. Sampsell writes so honestly it feels reckless.

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I've been waiting and waiting to read this book. I heard Sampsell read at an offsite event at AWP Chicago and I swear he said it was from a book he was working on. It just struck me heavy and I had to see the whole thing. Since then, I've been watching and watching for the novel to come out. I just couldn't wait, and then it was here. I'm virtually certain this is the book that piece he read was from, though I can't say for certain or whether, if so, that piece made it in the final book. Regardless, this is exactly what I was waiting for. There is an oddness to the stream of thoughts, though still completely normal and human, that pulls me right in. Honestly, it feels like I'm intruding in a way, though I still feel welcome. It's so intimate and so sweeping: funny, embarrassing, awkward, tender, erotic, and so much else. A love story really can't be simple, clearly defined boundaries between only exact people and only one emotion at a time, and Sampsell doesn't try to force it to be so. Instead Sampsell somehow manages the full gamut, everything. Some moments are hysterical and some are beautifully heartbreaking. I'm so glad I was watching for this one. It's absolutely worth it.