Review: "A Place for People Like Us" by Danila Botha

A Place for People Like Us by Danila Botha
Published September 2025 via Guernica Editions
★★★

To Hannah, Jillian is everything that is cool—not always stable, and not always kind, but magnetic. They're friends and they're lovers and then they're friends again, especially as Hannah dives deep into a new relationship that will ultimately ask her to change just about everything about herself. But, well, not everything is as it seems.

I read this partly for the friendship side of things (I love books about friendship) and partly for the complicated religion side of things (...ditto). The religion side of things is fascinating, if sad: Hannah, who grew up in a cult (here I should note that there are some graphic depictions of CSA within her memories of that experience), falls for Naftali, who is an Orthodox Jew, and it becomes clear that the relationship can only progress if she converts. Naftali is happy with a conversion on paper, but it quickly becomes clear that his family is more complicated, and no matter what Hannah does she's going to be giving part of herself up.

The friendship side of things opens the book, loses some focus as Hannah dives deeper into Judaism and her relationship, and then comes back in full force later in the book—because Jillian is not well, and Hannah and Naftali represent one of the more reliable parts of her life. I wasn't entirely sure what to make of that plot line; it's clear for much of the book that there are things that Jillian isn't saying, but Hannah can't or doesn't want to hear it anyway. By then the book is moving faster through time, months passing where days might have before, and Hannah's life is so detached from what it was at the beginning of the book that it's hard to recognize.

The writing was a little hit-or-miss for me. There's a lot of exposition through dialogue, in a way that didn't feel very natural to me. I think I also wanted to see...mm, I'm not quite sure how to put this, but I'm not sure if Hannah ever really considers the consequences of what she's deciding throughout the book. She gets on one train and then another, and if she ever stops to wonder whether she might be able to choose her destination, I'm not sure we see it. The climax of the book comes late, with a hiss and a crash, and if one thing is clear it's that she'll have to find a new train. I do love how messy it gets (there comes a point when Hannah simply doesn't have a lot of good options, and it's also clear that her upbringing hasn't left her with all that many good options), and I'd love to see what Botha might do with either a less dialogue-heavy book or perhaps a script written for the stage.

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