Review: "My Favourite" by Sarah Jollien-Fardel

My Favourite by Sarah Jollien-Farden
Translated from the French by Holly James
Published April 2025 via the Indigo Press
★★★

I was a child. I understood things without knowing. (loc. 50*)

Growing up in a Swiss village, much of what Jeanne knows is violence. She learns early to gauge her father's moods and the likelihood that violence will follow; she learns early that the other adults in her life will be complicit by their silence and inaction. And it is the shadow of her father's violence that follows her through the years that follow, as she weighs—consciously and unconsciously—her love for her mother and sister against the deep-rooted lessons of her childhood that she can't quite seem to shake.

My body is a fortress: it doesn't know peace. (loc. 420)

This reminds me a little of Sara Gallardo's January, though even as I say that I don't think the comparison is quite right. I think it's in the sense of time and place—era is not so explicitly defined in My Favourite, but there is still a sense of a time in the past when much more was left unsaid, and a further sense of rural isolation. The story largely takes a 'looking back' kind of tone, which works for me because this is relatively short; I think in a longer work I might have preferred something a bit more dynamic.

In many ways I think this is something of a character study of Jeanne in the wave of her trauma. Where she is fleshed out, the other characters are not; they're left as sketches. I found that this didn't really bother me, because the point of those other characters seemed more about how Jeanne did and didn't and could and couldn't act with and react to them. Her sister, who is fundamentally good but a bit scatty, and whose trauma takes a different shape; her father, who has brief moments of grief but otherwise only rage; her first partner, who has no hope of doing anything other than following in parental footsteps; her partner later in the book, who is nothing but unfailingly thoughtful. As themselves, they're not terribly interesting; if you read them more for how Jeanne acts around them, they're more interesting. (Jeanne's last scene with her father, and her insights into what her reactions mean for the way Marine will see her going forward—that's what I'm here for.) I'm not so interested in the affair Jeanne has, but again, what I think is most valuable about that is that it can only ever give her some of what she is looking for. 3.5 stars, in a way that kept me interested enough to round up.

I'm curious about the choice to translate the French title, Sa préférée, as My Favourite—my French is rather rusty, so what do I know, but I think a more expected translation would be His Favourite. The question of a 'favourite' does come up a couple of times, in a couple of different contexts, and I suppose I wonder how much those contexts played into the choice of translation for the title.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.