Persephone, after discovering she is pregnant attempts to kill her husband , Misha, in his sleep. Guilt ridden, she goes out until wee hours of the night as Misha sleeps and even consults a psychic. A neighbor disappears, abandoning his live-in girlfriend. A package arrives with an exhibition catalog, and the name of a familiar gallery and the artist on view. The Exhibition of Persephone Q. of a naked women on a bed turns out to be Persephone herself. She sets about to find out why her fiance had taken the photograph while she slept when they were engaged, why he had not told her before it was on exhibition, and why he, her close friends and the receptionist at the gallery all dispute that she is the woman in the exhibition.

This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

A woman is convinced her ex has used her as a model for an exhibition he is putting on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in New York City. A woman caught in some sort of fairy dream-fugue state-mental health crisis wanders the city.

This was an interesting premise, and the narrator's mood is relatable for anyone who has even been avoidant in the face of a major life change (or changes). There were times I found myself skimming a bit, especially over that particularly long internet comment about waxing. The setting in New York immediately after 9/11 also didn't quite fit or ring true to my memories of that time, and I rather wondered why it was necessary to set it then, or any particular time at all.

I read this entirely on a flight, and found it great for that atmosphere--it moved quickly and didn't make me cry in public.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital ARC.

This novel and I were not destined to get along. I am aware that others may rate it highly, but for me the maddening narrator, her meanderings around Manhattan, bizarre behavior and unsatisfactory recollections were a recipe for disappointment. The writing is good, imaginative, descriptively immediate. But the story? Insubstantial. Intentionally opaque. Random. Not my cuppa tea.

I seriously did not understand this novel. It started out promising. It had this haunting quality to it, but things quickly started to steer off course halfway through. I felt like I was watching "The Twilight Zone" but in book form. I enjoy a quirky story when I'm in the mood for one but this was a little too weird. Such a bizarre and head-scratching premise. Everything felt pretentious. The author was trying WAY TOO HARD to sound clever and sophisticated. The main protagonist, Percy was the most withdrawn, creepiest character I've ever read. But at the same time, she had absolutely no depth or substance. Basically she scared the crap out of me. The ending left me feeling hallowed and annoyed. It definitely gave me a headache. The prose was decent though. I think it's the positive thing I can really say. If you like morbid novels, then this one might work for you. Good luck with that.

Thank you, Netgalley and FSG for the digital ARC.

Release date: March 3, 2020

There is a lot going on in this novel, but most of it blown up in the mind of the main character. Post 9/11 NYC was well portrayed but the narrative felt like it needed to be tightened up.

So let me get this straight: Our protagonist, sleepless, malleable Percy, quit her job at an auction house, now works as a proof reader for a self-help author on intimacy and sex (oh, the symbolism!), and suddenly finds a picture of her naked sleeping self (shown without her head) at the center of a foto exhibition by her ex-fiancé, to whom she still refers as her fiancé. She also stops talking to her Bulgarian new economy husband because she suddenly feels the urge to pinch his nose while he's asleep. Oh, yes, and people around her do not believe that it's her body in the exhibition. Is this really a book about losing ownership of the self in the digital age, about, hold on!, identity? Nope, it's a book about a pregnant woman whose adrift in her own life and who, for rather mysterious reasons, experiences an existential crisis - considering her behavior, the fact that people around her do not believe her seems only logical.

Yes, the novel does talk about Percy's alienation - from New York post-9/11, from her husband, and mainly from herself - but as none of the characters are believable and their motivations remain unclear, there is almost no impact. And then there's the symbolism/metaphor overload (the self help author, the image without the head, the exhibition itself, Percy's real name, the rotting face, the psychic...) that points to...yes, to what exactly? It's all a lofty cloud of allusions, alluding to nothing tangible, nothing of substance. If a book written in 2019 about alienation in the big city seems less relevant for postmodern audiences than Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, published in freakin' 1910 and dealing with the same topic, the book has a problem.

In Greek mythology, Persephone is not only associated with fertility (pregnant Percy, you know), she also becomes the queen of the underworld after Hades abducts and marries her. Hades gives Persephone some pomegranate seeds to eat, and because she tasted food in the underworld, she subsequently has to spent every winter there. Once again: You can connect the Persephone myth with Percy's story in a myriad ways (NY, the husband, the child, the art world, the ex-fiancé, you name it), but you can also leave it be, because there is nothing substantial to gain by doing that.

So all in all, this novel deals with well-known topics and packs them in an overblown, meandering story, thus creating a web of ideas and allusions that unfortunately did not manage to captivate me.