Review by Booklist Review
On the first page of journalist Taddeo's (Three Women, 2019) first novel, Joan is dining with a lover when Vic, her married boss, walks into the restaurant and shoots himself. After this incendiary start, Taddeo dispenses details slowly in Joan's penetrating narration; the plot forming more of a scattershot spiral than an arc. After Vic's death, Joan packs up her few belongings, much of them her mother's things, their value only sentimental, and leaves New York for her sweltering new home in a gritty, coyote-crowded Topanga Canyon compound. Joan lost her parents in a mysterious but horrific event when she was just ten. A rape occurred during her journey west. She occasionally addresses her story to someone, though we don't know who, and plans to find a younger woman called Alice. Joan is running, in other words, but she's in no hurry to say why, or what from. Her uber-confessional storytelling leaves readers certain, though, that all truths will emerge eventually, and Taddeo creates impressive suspense as they do. A provocative novel of sex, love, and rage for readers drawn to psychologically rich, feminist literary fiction.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Taddeo made waves (and lots of best-of lists) with Three Women (2019), a nonfiction book about women's sex lives, and readers will be curious about her highly charged first novel.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Taddeo's underwhelming debut novel (after the nonfiction narrative Three Women), a re-traumatized woman faces her painful past. Joan, 37, leaves New York City for Los Angeles after her boss, Vic, with whom she had been having an affair, shoots himself in front of her at a restaurant. Witnessing Vic's death brings back memories for Joan, who lost her parents to a gruesome act of violence when she was 10, which left her orphaned and with a sizable inheritance. Joan believes a young woman named Alice, a yoga teacher in L.A., whom she'd never met, holds the key to understanding the night of her parents' death, and the reason is initially withheld from the reader as well as Alice, after the two women form a superficial intimacy revolving around men and how terrible they are. Unfortunately, Alice suffers from thin characterization that renders her little more than a device for Joan's development. And though the men are certainly horrible, especially the ones in Joan's life--including her dead father--Taddeo misses an opportunity for a more critical exploration of female rage, relying instead on the shock value of the third act's violent scenes. Recent novels such as A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers have treated similar themes with more imagination and depth. Jennifer Joel, ICM Partners. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Three Women, Taddeo returns with a debut novel featuring a woman who has endured countless daily cruelties from men. Finally witnessing an act of violence, she plumbs her childhood memories and turns violent herself. With a 150,000-copy first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An alluring, sophisticated, sexually voracious, and emotionally ruined woman moves to California to track down a connection to her tragic past. After finding critical and popular nonfiction success with Three Women (2019), Taddeo makes her fiction debut with a propulsive, erotic, emotional thriller focusing on a 37-year-old woman. Joan is fleeing New York after having watched her married lover shoot himself while she was out to dinner with his replacement, but this horrific experience is the tip of a very large iceberg with layers of trauma that began when she lost both parents at age 10. As Joan puts it, "If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use." She rents a little house in Topanga Canyon on a large piece of property that is also home to a well-known rapper, a hot guy in a yurt, and a wealthy older man who has recently lost his wife. Once unpacked, she almost immediately runs into the person she went there looking for--a young woman named Alice, who she believes can help her understand what happened to her parents. Taddeo balances the sex, violence, and melodrama of her plot with insightful character development. Joan is almost impossible to look away from on every page. "When I saw boys in the streets with their low-slung backpacks, I thought of the girls they liked, the girls who got to be eleven and twelve and thirteen, with unicorn stickers and slap bracelets. I did not get to be any of those ages. I was ten and then I was thirty, and then I was thirty-seven." Or this: "I knew the precise color I wanted my coffee and how to have an orgasm in under thirty seconds. I needed everybody in the world--including waiters--less than they needed me." If the story goes off the rails in the final chapters, the burning questions driving it are satisfyingly answered. As full of sensuality, amorality, and drama as its riveting narrator. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
