Sometimes, the stories that stay with us the longest are the ones that don’t need grand gestures or dramatic twists—they simply invite us to feel. Soph Tang’s Decadence is one of those stories: funny, haunting, and deeply human. It lingers like a memory you didn’t expect to come back.
Elise and Viri have built a tender, everyday love—a life marked by familiarity, small rituals, and shared understanding. But Elise’s anxiety, while manageable, casts a long shadow, shaping how she moves through the world and how she relates to her partner. Everything is steady, until a voice from the past—her high school ex, Lily—breaks through with shocking news, and with it, a cascade of long-buried emotions.
What follows is less a love triangle and more an excavation. Elise is forced to look back: not just at Lily, but at her younger self, her fears, and the ways she’s learned (and failed) to speak about what she really feels.
Decadence stands out not just for what it explores, but how. From a well-placed scene with a therapist early on, to repeated dialogue cues like “Use your adult words,” Soph Tang centers emotional literacy—how we feel things, how we name them, and how we communicate them to others. Tang’s prose is subtle but layered, blending moments of casual slang (in on-page text threads and conversations that feel lifted straight from real-life group chats) with introspective, sometimes poetic observations. The millennial queer cast is vibrant and painfully relatable, capturing both the ache of nostalgia and the urgency of living fully in the now.
There’s a raw honesty in the book’s emotional terrain. Elise’s journey isn’t about choosing between two people—it’s about showing up for herself and confronting the parts of her that have long gone unspoken. And while that may sound abstract, Decadence is anything but. Its most powerful scenes are grounded in acts of care: a well-timed snack, a shared silence, the decision to simply be there. These moments remind us that love isn’t always loud. Sometimes, it’s quiet, awkward, even funny—and all the more beautiful for it.
Decadence is a must-read for fans of Sally Rooney, Casey McQuiston, and Carmen Maria Machado. If you’re a millennial who still texts in lowercase, cries during therapy, and wonders what might’ve happened if you’d sent that message back in 2009—this one’s for you.
-K
The Book Report 