friends, let’s celebrate as I have gotten my very first physical ARC. Hooray! I feel like I have hit the big time as a book blogger.
Katerina has her big break, she is finally going to be a lead coloratura soprano role in an opera based on Barbarella. It is with a smaller opera company in Midtown, but it is in Manhattan at the center of the operatic community. She is confident and excited but has to deal with her understudy Yolanda who thinks she deserves the role, and the day they meet Yolanda poisons Kat by slipping an entire bottle of eye drops into her green tea. Kat can’t prove it, and passes it off as a prank, but she ends up hospitalized. Over the course of the next few months, they have a frenemy relationship, we aren’t sure if Kat should trust Yolanda, or what the deal is with her past. The book takes a turn at around the 50% mark, and to not give any spoilers, but this is when the book actually gets good.
Frankly the first half of the book made me a bit uncomfortable, it seemed vaguely misogynistic and problematic. The whole “women in competition with each other/cat fight/jealousy”narrative is tired. I don’t love the story of women competing with each other and trying to wipe out the other and hating each other. No thanks. This is a harmful trope whether they are fighting over a man or a role. So ironic, too, that they are competing for the lead role in an opera based on a role made famous by Jane Fonda who is one of the most prominent feminist activists of her generation.
That all changes when something happens halfway through, and the rest of the book is great. So if you are reading this and you can get to the middle you will find a good character study, cat-and-mouse psychological mystery/thriller that keeps a strong pace and satisfying and unpredictable conclusion. The Manhattan and opera business setting was exciting and a fun atmospheric element to the pacing and narrative.
I was given a complimentary advanced copy of this book from Penguin Random House/AA Knopf in exchange for an honest review. Book to be published August 5, 2025.
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