Sylvia—along with her faithful girlfriend, Charlie—arrives at the lake house of her university friend Karen. The secluded weeklong vacation is intended to be a much-needed reunion of their old friend group, which also includes reserved Esben, wild Quince, and caring Gry, who’s also brought her husband, Adam. After the first day among the “quiet and dazzling” lake and “silver birch trees,” Karen and Esben, who have been in love since the group’s undergraduate days, announce that they intend to get married during the vacation. Everyone is excited except Sylvia, who’s had a decade-long crush on Esben. The news sends her into a tailspin of yearning, causing her to doubt her own feelings about monogamy. “We could be living this utopian life together,” she argues to her friends, who are all settled in adulthood, “but instead…you have to choose between loneliness or a twosome, which is the same as loneliness.” Ernst’s novel explores the boundaries we maintain and the boundaries we are willing to cross in pursuit of romantic and platonic love. Through the loving, reminiscent, and sometimes awkward exchanges between old friends, the reader learns which insecurities define an entangled group of millennials hoping to impress each other: “Esben looks at the table, takes stock—is there an i to dot? He goes back inside, returns holding champagne and fruit juice, bottles dewy with cold.” Ernst brings the lush setting of the novel alive, using descriptions of food—like the “crisp and fatty” fried wild elder blossoms—to highlight the physical decadence of the Danish countryside and the ideological decadence of Sylvia’s proposed nonmonogamous utopia.