Overall, I thought this was a well-crafted, full-length debut, and although it could be curiously static, it was sufficiently intelligent and intriguing to hold my attention. Born in Germany and based in the UK, Anna Metcalfe is a novelist and scholar whose work includes Blind Water Pass and Chrysalis. For Susie this woman is a possible role model, someone to emulate as much as she is someone to nurture.

It goes beyond body positivity and becomes body power as she gets stronger and stronger and literally starts to look too big for rooms. We learn of our unnamed main character through Susie, a former colleague who offers her a home and a sanctuary. But at the same time, this book isn't really about the woman at all: Instead, it becomes about three people in her orbit, who are drawn to her and find a purpose in her presence. More than once it stopped me in my tracks with its elegant, understated, and startlingly poignant turns of phrase. They mind their own business and don’t put too much of themselves into the world—their own vibes or ideas or whatever.Although Metcalfe’s three perspectives offer a nuanced portrait of an online sensation, they are similar in tone. The parts all stand alone, and while all revolve around the same figure, “she” is never named, and is always a shadowy and unknowable figure. Metcalfe is insightful about the world of contemporary influencers, voyeurism and the rise of narcissism, but it’s hard to warm to her aloof heroine. In an essay on weightlifting, Kathy Acker describes the process of gradually building muscle as something that forces a confrontation with the limits of the body, “with chaos, with my own failure or a form of death”.

Unputdownable, ice-cool and wittily contemporary, Chrysalis announces Anna Metcalfe as a distinctive and daring fresh literary voice. but we never learn to whom these first-person narrations are addressed or the actual event that has necessitated them as there is no clear interlocutor - they are internal monologues suggesting possible others.of a woman from who she was onto who she wants to be through sheer strength and the building of that strength of body and mind. All three of the perspectives were intriguing, I love when incongruencies are casually revealed via a co-narrator. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this book- it was strange and engrossing but also left me feeling confused. We know so much about the woman at the centre of this story, from her childhood to her relationships to her friendships - yet we don't even know her name.

Chrysalis is a savvy exploration of one woman’s desire to inspire others, and how self-presentation can tip into obsession. Susie, a work colleague, supports the protagonist when she leaves her dysfunctional relationship and her job at a law firm. So much of the story existed in a seemingly liminal space, and it seems to be the authors' intent despite how much it left me wanting. They can barely explain it and from what they tell the reader it is hard to understand how this woman can be so influential, because she seems pretty awful and entirely selfish. This story is a bit of an odd one - the central plot follows an unnamed woman who becomes an online wellness cult leader and is told through the perspectives of three outsiders, which is an interesting conceit as, by nature, all three of the narrators paint incomplete and unreliable pictures of the protagonist.Ms Metcalfe has been selected by the literary magazine, Granta, as one of its promising young, new British novelists, it was this list that first introduced me to her.