Review by Booklist Review
Mrs. March, wearing fur and kidskin gloves, enters her favorite pastry shop in her classy Manhattan neighborhood as though stepping upon a stage, certain of everyone's admiration. After all, Mr. March is a very famous crime writer, and his new novel is being hailed as his best. But when the friendly shopkeeper observes that the book's pitiful protagonist resembles Mrs. March, a crack races through Mrs. March's inner world of distorting mirrors. As she makes her stunned way back to the luxurious March apartment, Feito locks the reader up inside the fracturing psyche of a woman of privilege who, through excruciatingly precise renderings of grotesque delusions, is revealed to be profoundly and perilously damaged. Feito masterfully orchestrates the bewildering horrors of Mrs. March's breakdown as she is assailed by memories of her loveless childhood and, playing sleuth, convinces herself that her husband is a rapist and a murderer. Each sharply realized and diabolical aspect of Mrs. March's life, hallucinations, and actions are spiked with chilling insights into the dark aspects of family, marriage, and wealth. Feito's bravura gothic thriller brilliantly exposes monstrous consequences of covert neglect and cruelty.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Feito's stylish and riveting psychological thriller of a woman on the edge has inspired a forthcoming film adaptation starring Elizabeth Moss.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Societal roles so thoroughly define the titular Upper East Side Manhattan matron of Feito's elegantly written, unflinchingly observed debut--first as the unwanted younger daughter in a frosty upper-crust New York family, now as the fastidious wife of literary sensation George March--that her first name isn't revealed until the final sentence. And Mrs. March's sense of self is sufficiently tenuous that it takes but a throwaway inquiry from the clerk at her favorite patisserie concerning whether the protagonist in George's current bestseller was modeled on her to trigger the initial tremors of an emotional earthquake. The increasingly delusional Mrs. March becomes convinced that her husband may have murdered a young woman in Maine during one of his annual hunting trips, a hypothesis she attempts to investigate. Though the suspense remains high up to the horrific final surprise, much of this woman-pushed-to-the-brink-of-madness story feels familiar, and if not for some contemporary references, Mrs. March's breakdown could be occurring in a Henry James drawing room. One looks forward to Feito training her clearly considerable talents on fresher material next time around. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary. (Aug.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT Mrs. March hasn't read the recent best-selling book by her husband George; all she's gleaned is that its main character is an unlikable, weathered woman. When a clerk at the local patisserie tells her that the book's protagonist seems to be based on Mrs. March herself, she's floored: "'But…--isn't she…' Mrs. March leaned in and in almost a whisper said, 'a whore?'" She runs out of the bakery, imagining all of her Upper East Side neighbors reading the book and laughing at her. Days later, she finds on George's desk a newspaper clipping about the recent disappearance of a young Maine girl named Sylvia; it reports that police have learned that she was beaten, raped, and murdered. George makes frequent trips to a hunting lodge in the area of the disappearance, and Mrs. March begins to imagine him as Sylvia's killer. Soon she travels to Maine and connives her way into Sylvia's home, where she spots signed copies of several of George's books; in her mind, this certifies her husband's guilt. Mrs. March's flights of fantasy now progress to psychotic episodes and flashbacks to her stoic upbringing; even readers will begin to question what is real and what is imagined. VERDICT Feito's debut can be classified as a literary psychological thriller, but it doesn't fit neatly into one genre. Fans of novels about psychological degeneration will be satisfied.--Edward Goldberg, Syosset P.L., NY
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In a horror-laced psychological drama, the wife of a bestselling New York novelist learns his latest protagonist is modeled on her. "But…isn't she...a whore?" whispers Mrs. March to the woman behind the counter at the patisserie she visits daily, who, like every other person in Manhattan, is reading, and loving, her husband's new book. Abandoning her purchases, she bolts from the store, never to return, and immediately confronts an advertisement featuring a woman smiling knowingly under the words "SHE HAD NO IDEA." Even the billboards know! This is just one of innumerable creepy details that speed Mrs. March's descent into a spiraling vortex of psychosis. Not that it's all in her head--copies of the book are everywhere, even in someone's cart at the grocery store. Debut novelist Feito sets her story in a hazy period in the pre-technology past and confines much of the action to her protagonist's claustrophobic Upper East Side apartment, where terrifying literati regularly convene for unbearable parties. Mrs. March's painfully low self-esteem drives the self-consciousness, paranoia, and jealousy that control her relationships with everyone from her housekeeper to her son to a family she runs into at the skating rink. The husband is there on a weekday? She thrills to speculate this means he's been laid off and concocts an elaborate lie to cover the real reason her own son is not in school. Mrs. March is the only character in the book who doesn't get a first name, even in a flashback to her childhood: "On tiptoes, Mrs. March cupped her hand and whispered into her mother's ear...'I have to go to the bathroom.' " While the poor woman never gets a break from the misery, Feito does offer the reader a few homeopathic drops of humor, such as when her protagonist learns that people will do just about anything you ask if you tell them you work for the New York Times. Feito is Spanish and lives in Madrid, but somehow she is the love child of Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson. On her way to the screen played by Elisabeth Moss, Mrs. March is absolutely right--everyone is talking about her. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
