The characterization fell flat. We are told things & not shown. I feel harsh saying this but I found myself caring more about George Sand & Chopin's relationship while reading an online article than when I read more than half of this book. I honestly do know what is up with people that they’ll be, like, okay, 16th century ghost, and she's gay for George Sand seems legit, wait “tasked” has been used as a verb, THAT IS A BRIDGE TOO FAR. There was a long silence and then the young man said, somewhat pointedly, “We were carrying things, Mama.” Speaking of plots, if you like stories where there isn’t that clear a narrative direction, where it really is just about characters living, then this would be one for you. George and her family clash with the villagers several times throughout the novel. Did you sympathize with one group over the other? What grievances did you feel were justified? Do you think a resolution could have been reached?

Klaces, Caleb (18 June 2022). "Briefly, a Delicious Life by Nell Stevens review – on holiday with Chopin and George Sand". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 January 2023.

Nell Stevens

Since Blanca is both hundreds of years old and fourteen, Stevens’ prose bursts with the beginnings of erotic excitement. ‘I start to see things differently,’ Blanca says of her adolescent awakening, ‘Courgettes.’ She and her mother find the monks in the charterhouse sexy (‘so much muscle and heft and fat and their lovely broad shoulders under their habits’), but this enthusiasm infuses everything. Blanca’s ability to sink into characters’ bodies - taste what they taste, feel what they feel, hear what they hear - means that a novel by a dead, disembodied character is surprisingly sensory, fat on life: it is about first kisses but also the scents of oranges and rotting pomegranates, ‘the sweetness of a stray sugar crystal’ from an apple tart dissolving on a tongue. A moment when Blanca hears Chopin’s piano-playing exemplifies Stevens’ sensual, synesthetic writing:

Three hundred years earlier, I’d seen Brother Tomás with Brother Mateo in that very same garden, beard crushing against beard and the clatter of rosary beads hitting the paving stones. A decade or so after that, there was the boy from the village who sold bad oranges with the boy in the kitchens who made bad preserves. Around the turn of the sixteenth century there was a complex triangulation amongst Brothers Augustin, Miguel, and Simón. And so on, over the years: countless combinations, differing ages, differing levels of urgency and tenderness, but always more or less the same, the kissing and gripping and so often the very same skittishness, the entirely justified fear of being found out, the creeping sensation that they were being watched. Briefly, A Delicious Life is a story about breaking convention, and about love – yearning, secret, forbidden, unrequited. Stevens, Nell (2022). Briefly, a delicious life. London. ISBN 978-1529083422. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) This reading group guide for BRIEFLY, A DELICIOUS LIFE includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book. wear their unconventionality, in George&#8217scase, literally on their sleeves, find themselves in deepeningI will also say that the whole "sapphic love story" aspect of this is barely in the novel, so I wouldn't get your hopes up about that.) (Oh, and the ending was so clumsy and anticlimactic; it felt like it undermined what was already a very shaky story to begin with.) We know we are curious about the dead, but imagine a life lived so vibrantly as to make the dead curious about us. Nell Stevens brings a reader into the strange and brilliant artistic exile of George Sand, writing this tender story with tremendous heart and daring. Here, reader, are the low-lying truths of love, art and time." I found Blanca's narration to be very intriguing. She not only acts as a watcher like, Death does in The Book Thief, but she also has this ability to directly interact and somewhat influence what is going on in the narrative. Moreover, she is able to read some thoughts of the characters as well as witness their pasts. This is especially true of her approach to George who she is enamoured by. I also found it interesting how intimate Blanca gets with all the characters whether it is laying in bed with them as she listens to their internal monologue for how personally she gets invested in their struggles. I love when you can get to know a character through their style of narration and that is definitely true of how Blanca is written.