The Safekeep: Yael van der Wouden

A critical look at this book

One trend I dislike is the suppression of negative reviews. Many folks who enjoyed this book might feel unhappy with my review, and so I paywalled it. Too often, fans and creators alike bash anyone who dares post one (even those from professional reviewers), and it’s creating a world in while reviews cannot be trusted, everyone gets a gold star for effort, and we (including professional writers) don’t get the feedback necessary for improvement. Abuse should be rightly shut down and ignored, but it’s also necessary to differentiate between abuse and less than glowing reviews.

I spent a long time deliberating this review. In it, I discuss queerness and heteronormativity, and I was genuinely afraid of offending folks who take this book as being representative of #diversity and #queer, when the book is simple entertainment. My fear wasn’t unfounded because I received several harassing messages and several that had false information, and a fellow queer woman left a comment saying “we both know why”. I figured out why.

I’ve only seen glowing reviews of this debut novel, Yael van der Wouden’s ‘The Safekeep’. The basic plot: it’s set in 1960 Netherlands, and echoes back to WWII. The author does a fantastic job of building up suspense once you get back the slow first few chapters. Then, the pace changes to neck breaking speed. The main characters are quite cliched and not believable, and the shift from hate to love feels…even more far-fetched and not explained (save perhaps, lust?). The premise and ending are too on the nose and too neatly “let’s give everyone a happy ending”. It’s not my favorite type of fiction as it’s plot driven rather than literary, which I’d define as prose, character and/or philosophy driven. It’s written like a best-seller. To sell like one, it turns the lesbian experience into one that reads like heteronormativity but happens to involve two women.

As a lesbian reading glowing reviews from non-lesbians, with so many mentioning how wonderful it is that a book about lesbians exists at all, and how grateful they are to have read it. It’s popular amongst #booktok and #bookstagram readers with little knowledge of queerness. This is where my annoyance comes in. There are many stories and books about lesbians, ones that better capture what it means to be a queer woman, and the queer experience - but they aren’t nearly as popular. Nor will they be. This book is high-pitch melodrama yet soft-focused - sanitized, softened, made palatable. An entire chapter-long intimate scene written in a vaguely soft-glow way that feels like book version of a movie scene between straight actresses playing lesbians. This book feeds into that as many people already reduce the entire lesbian experience to that: fetishization, soft-focus sex, an identity reduced to merely who you choose to have sex with. There’s no processing of identity, self, presentation, and form of queerness that most people coming to terms with a queer existence go through, nothing about the reality of being queer in 1960s The Netherlands. Yet, so many #bookstagram reviews spoke of how this book taught them so much about being queer or was a “gateway drug” to lesbians, missing that it’s a work of fiction that does not pretend to be representative of reality. This is troubling because this book that makes being queer as easy as being straight. Uncomplicated. Nothing to complain about.

The way this book is interpreted, and its popularity scares me because that is exactly the reaction of many of my straight and straight-ish friends and strangers. No thought to homophobia, to stares, to comments, the uncomfortable ways in heterosexual folks often sexualize queer ones, to the straight female client who sexually harassed me and similar experiences, no thoughts of the dreaded possibility that I could lose the right to marry the person I love, to be at their hospital bedside or they at mine and all the other legal rights that accompany marriage/civil unions, to the constant exclusion and othering that LGBTQI+ people face on a daily basis, to the small, silent threaten of homophobic and “corrective” violence, even though I’m in what many people would consider the most friendly city in the world in which to be homosexual. In this book, none of that exists.

Personally, I think this book isn’t one that’s popular in the queer community for the reasons I described. I haven’t seen a lesbian’s review of this book (save this one right here). I don’t speak for all lesbians, and I’m sure the ones that enjoyed this book exist, yet not coming across one after reading many, many (MANY) reviews of this book is telling. Nor do any of my IRL lesbian ever talk about it. I’ve talked plenty of lesbian/queer lit with queer friends, some that are purely rooted in fantasy, including Sarah Waters, Virginia Woolf, Carmen Maria Machado, Priory of the Orange Tree, The Jasmine Throne series, and The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. The fantasy novels included in that list include more about queer identity than ‘The Safekeep’. Or read Eva Baltasar, Constance Debre, Natalie Barney, Radclyffe Hall, Patricia Highsmith, Carson McCullers, Djuna Barnes, or so many others - authors that write of the often beautiful, sometimes terrible struggle of queer womanhood. For a relationship between two queer women isn’t just a swap of gender. There is a rich range of experience and emotion in queer womanhood: a range that, in my opinion, this very popular book ignores almost entirely. And if you’re a person who knows little about that experience, don’t think this book explains it to you.