Thank you NetGalley for providing me the ARC!!

A solid 3 stars. Really liked the writing and atmosphere but couldnt connect with the characters throughout the book
PS: The cover is amazing!!

Wes and Diana are married. They are truly “beautiful” people and they know it. He wonders if his lovely, intelligent wife completes him. She seems to be in a silent war of sparring with him. Viviien and Dale are engaged. Both are successful and seem a perfect match. However, they are secretly searching for something. Both couples meet and interact with one another. Wes shares traits with Vivian; Dale is enamored with Diana who with continual use of Visine seems to be seeking a clearer vision. Portraits of Narcissus remind the reader how aptly this mythological figure reflects these characters. We witness how they bait one another. Will they resist or give in to temptation? A. Natasha Joukovsky steeps her storyline in allusions to mythology, classics and art; her settings are lovely. The language at times, however, seems pretentious. I did not find the characters’ judgmental opinions humorous. I neither liked nor disliked these people; I just wanted them to go away.

A gorgeous mess of words, bursting with adjectives I haven’t encountered since the days of weekly vocabulary quizzes in high school. The overall effect is a novel that’s in love with itself and words and literature, probably not accidental seeing as the story repackages the myth of Narcissus into a modern day love quadrangle.

Dense and funny, The Portrait of a Mirror will appeal to a certain social set: the management consultants; the tech bros who read something other than Jeff Bezos biographies; the museum membership pass-holders; and anyone with property in the Hamptons or other exclusive Eastern coastal enclave. I worry, however, that readers will think they’re laughing at the narcissistic protagonists while in fact they are laughing along with them because alas, the social critique here could not even cut through butter. Far of satirizing the ego and foibles of this class, Joukovsky’s writing plumps them up, lionizes them even.

I wanted a little more bite in this canapé of a novel covered in caviar.

I think this could be the book of the year!!! I loved it and almost feel like I need to read it mulltiple times to really get all of the references and subtle jokes. Very artfully done and engaging

A. Natasha Joukovsky has dished up a hysterical novel about perfect people and their interesting private lives. Diane and Wes and Vivien and Dale are two couples hailing from the one percent of American society. The four youngsters went to the best prep schools, colleges and now work in the best jobs. Their profiles are the envy of many of us who believe in the USA's upward trajectory of life. Behind the scenes, of course, not all is perfect. Wes and Diane live in a loft that seems to irritate them, not comfy but big and empty. Dale and Vivien are planning their country club wedding for the coming summer. The affair will be perfect, that goes without saying in Vivien's mind.

Things begin to get crazy when New York Diane goes to Philadelphia for a consulting job, and Philadelphia Vivien goes to New York to curate an exhibit a the Met. Vivien's exhibition involves paintings of Narcissus. An excellent image of him serves as the cover of the book. This funny story gives plenty of details on the superficiality of the rich kids' lives and brilliant insights into their relationships and unhappy souls. Narcissus serves as a perfect symbol in this great story. If you like to watch the mighty stumble, this is the book for you.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this e-ARC.

Special thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC of this novel! What a stunning debut. The prose was incisive and clever, so much so that I simply couldn’t put the book down. The precision with which both couples and their interactions is written is truly commendable. Additionally, the author’s ability to tease out so many nuances and levels of meaning through these interactions is one I have not found elsewhere, and that I greatly admire. While I found the novel to be tiresome at times in its descriptions of the elite and all their quirks, it was thankfully not to the point that I was prevented from enjoying the plot and the characters.

Overall, The Portrait of a Mirror was a fantastic read; this is definitely a book to be on the look out for in the upcoming months.

I wanted to like this book. The premise was so intriguing — a modern-day reinvention of the myth of Narcisuss, who fell in love with his own reflection.

The novel is about two couples, Wes and Diana and Vivian and Dale. They're the kind of people you see on Instagram and are all entangled in their rich world of prep schools, and overlapping work lives. The two couples intertwine after being unexpectedly thrust together and are forced to reckon with this inexplicably complicated tangle they have made for themselves. The characters are believable but insufferable with their wealth, privilege and infidelity. The author clearly recognized and utilizes this as it almost borders on satire.

But, in the end, this book just wasn't for me. It's so overblown with long descriptions of everything from the hit 2015 podcast "Serial" to redundant details of people viewing a painting. It's excessively wordy, overindulgent and was just too much for me. I was glad to see it end.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy.

Interesting premise, but had little or no empathy for the characters. Enjoyed the art history passages!

This book sounds fascinating: a modern retelling of the myth of Narcissus. However, the first thing I noticed when starting this book was the excessive wordiness. This book is full of clunky, overlong sentences and overindulgent prose. I found myself rereading sentences trying to figure out what the hell the author was trying to say.
Here’s an example: “The diffusion of acute pain offered a euphoric moment of relative relief, a self-congratulatory animal delight in the ability to breathe that, as his heartbeat slowed, circulated into a dull tingle at his extremities.” Eye roll.
I continued on in hopes that the fastidious reading that this book requires would be worth it. But then the second chapter is mostly just technical corporate jargon, and that’s where this book lost me. I’ve read many positive reviews and I’m fine with admitting that this one just isn’t for me. Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Oh my gosh, I loved this book! I found it to be so clever and really well thought out. I think the characters were all super likable in a way that made you hate them..does that make sense? Like they were all so perfectly successful, wealthy and attractive that you hated them for being that amazing.

What I liked about this book was its poetic nature..I’m a fan of the classics and Narcissus makes such an interesting subject and story to retell.

I will definitely be picking up a hard copy of this book when it hits shelves. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book!

This is an extremely clever and well-written book from what I read, so the author can obviously write. But I just can’t justify reading a book about super wealthy, super attractive, super educated, super pretentious people at this time in my life. I do think I will give this book a re-read when I am at a different stage in my life, but being a struggling 24 year old with a MA and perpetual anxiety about getting into a PhD program and making ends meet, this was not the type of escapism that interests me or that I need right now. But again, the writing was unbelievably good, and I will read what the author puts out next and will also be giving this a re-read. Just cuts a little too deep right now for me

dnf after 30 pages

Yes, sure, I did not get far. And I am not having the best day with arcs.
This is a retelling of Narcissus from Greek mythology, the guy who was so enamored with his own reflection that he drowned after trying to kiss it. In a very meta way, I can see how the writing fits this theme, and I get the portrayal of a cold, distant but seemingly perfect and sooo handsome man as narcissus.

Our protagonist comes from money but he has none at the moment, all that's to his name he has worked himself for, so you can't really fault him for his name. Let's forget what kind of upbringing money can give and what kind of advantages come with this.
He hates his wife but loves the drama so he doesn't divorce. He is so competent but confuses time to get up with time to be at an event. His flaws get mentioned to show oh yes, he has them, but are destructed with the next breath.

The author uses words with many, many syllables and write so pretentiously that after each sentence, I feel like they are turning to me to gauge my reaction, see how they done, want me to tell them how clever they are.
I love play with language. Gormenghast is one of my favourite books of all time. But in this, it only looks obnoxious and as I said, I am sure it ties in neatly with the theme. But it's nothing I want to read for as long as 200 pages, because the verb I'd be using for that would be to endure, not to enjoy.

From what I saw from the other reviews, again, this one is polarizing: You love it or you hate it.
So I'd recommend that if the plot sounds appealing to you and I haven't turned you away, that you go and search for an excerpt and look for yourself.

The arc was provided by the publisher.

Pros: The cover of this book (Caravaggio!) is what first got my attention. The description was also intriguing—a modern take on Narcissus. There were hints of Fates and Furies vibes. I liked the chapters that were in different formats—letters, texts, emails, etc.

Cons: The main plot points in this book are about infidelity. This book feels too wordy, and at times the use of “big words” felt forced.

Thank you to NetGalley and Abrams - The Overlook Press for the opportunity to read this book!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

I had very mixed feelings about this book - after a couple false starts, I nearly gave up in the first chapter. The writing is overwrought, vocabulary a bit pretentious. I couldn't decide if it was for literary effect, or to impress the reader, though it got a bit tedious using the Kindle lookup feature. Not sure I'll ever read a book again that uses "sartorial" and "inchoate" multiple times. I skimmed a good portion of the last 15% of the novel, as it went far too deep into bringing the running mythology theme than I needed or wanted to go.

However, once I got going - despite the complete unlikeability of the four main characters, I devoured this book, and had to find out what bad decisions were going to happen next. It was always a treat when secondary characters Julian and Eric made their appearances to lighten the mood - would love to see a spin-off on either one of them.

Once released, I predict this will be a love or hate book, and quite probably optioned for a mini-series. I'd watch it. For readers who have not tired of novels about privileged young white New Yorkers (or for a little twist, Philadelphians), and love a character-driven novel, this is for you.

Indulgent. Insufferable characters. Clever writing. Humorous.
I had such mixed feelings from one extreme to the next while reading this, which I do understand is the point. I appreciated the character development and societal commentary but I think I will soon forget this read.

<i>”A stunning reinvention of the myth of Narcissus”</i> written in prose that is somewhat in love with itself. How appropriate!

Wes and Diana live in New York, Dale and Vivien in Philadelphia. When both women’s work means they switch cities, you can guess what is going to happen. It all takes place in the worlds of art museums and technology consultancies, where people gather and say things like <i>”In my view, you can never have too much caviar”</i>. And where people play power games, some of which seemed all too familiar to me having spent several years of my life working for an IT consultancy. The office repartee is sharp and intelligent. And so is the book.

Not a lot happens, really. We follow the story of what happens when Diana goes to Philadelphia and meets Dale, and Vivien goes to New York and meets Wes. Some of it you can probably guess. As the book’s blurb puts it, <i>the two couples’ lives cross and tangle</i>.

But you don’t need a lot to happen in a book when there are plenty of other things to keep your interest. Vivien’s exhibition (she’s a curator rather than an artist) in New York brings some fascinating discussion of art into the book. The author herself spent five years working in the art world at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, so we already have the locations and the environment drawn from the author’s own experience. When she writes about art, she does so from a position of understanding.

But there seems to be a lot more of the author than just that in this book. She has drawn on her own life (the internet gives us an account of her wedding in The New York Times in which we learn she met her husband at a debating society which is exactly how one of the couples in the book meets), but she has also brought together some of her own key interests. There is an article on the internet by the author which uses the book Anna Karenina to discuss alternative facts (and Donald Trump) and Anna Karenina, the book not the person, features in the novel. On her blog, Joukovsky says <i>”After Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, where he tracks allusions to whales and cetology, I keep a running list of references to recursion, innovation, mythology, and glamour.</i> And “recursion, innovation, mythology and glamour” would not be a bad summary of The Portrait of a Mirror. Part way though the story, we are reminded by one of the characters of the classic example of recursion where you place two mirrors opposite one another and an infinite series of mirrors appears. Time and time again in this novel we gradually work our way through multiple levels of significance and meaning. The book knows what it is doing and isn’t afraid to poke fun at itself. Towards the end we read

<i>He understood, and she understood; she knew he understood, he knew she understood. He knew she knew he understood, and she knew he knew she knew he understood. They understood each other, perfectly.</i>

In fact there are several points where the book is very self aware. One character says that no one ends books with a wedding nowadays, so…

I have to acknowledge that I initially struggled with the style of the book. As I said at the start, the text feels a bit like it is in love with itself. But I quickly gave myself a talking to: this is a re-working of the myth of Narcissus, so go with the flow - it would be wrong if the text didn’t love itself a bit. So, yes, there are complicated sentences that take longer to say something than they need to and use words that I had to look up in the dictionary. But, once I settled into it and accepted it as a feature, it became fun. I see from the very few other reviews (on Goodreads) that I can see at the time of writing that not everyone reacted that way and it turned some off the book. I can understand that reaction, but I think I chose fairly quickly to treat it all as part of the “wicked fun” the blurb refers to. Note that several chapters consist of email, instant message etc. transcripts which move the story forward by letting us see the communications between people. These sections are also fun to read.

The book is quite American in flavour. I had to Google some of references to American things. I also used Google a fair amount to look up the pictures that are discussed as part of Vivien’s exhibition and to check on some of the mythological characters who are mentioned. You can read the book without doing all that extra work, although I do think looking up the images discussed is worthwhile. There’s also a playlist in an appendix and, on first glance, I have virtually all of it in my iTunes library, so that might be a project for later this evening.

Ultimately this book was not for me. I feel that the author is certainly an artist, which can be seen both through the writing and the issues and themes tackled in this novel. If I were more familiar with the inspiration for The Portrait of a Mirror I may have connected with it more, but I always like to take a chance on re-tellings, even if I’m not familiar with them. I would definitely recommend this to my more literary-inclined friends!

I really enjoyed this novel which combines compelling characters, sparkling prose, and a provocative meditation on art. The novel is not pulling punches as it satirizes its main characters who all know of each other (even as they don't necessarily realize how well their partners know each other) and who all came of age in the same cultural milieu (although across several elite institutions). But as entertaining as it is to watch the twisted webs the main characters weave as they deceive each other and themselves, it's the Ovidian backdrop that makes the story so compelling. The myth of Narcissus, in particular, receives particular attention as the reader gets taken through a tour of an exhibition of art inspired by Ovidian myth. The image of museum-goers snapping selfies of themselves reflected in a mirror with one of the paintings in the exhibition really translates the myth into effective modern terms. I also particularly enjoyed the set-piece of the museum reception as reflected through the echo-chamber of social media--it may take a minute to get into the rhythm of reading social media posts, especially in an ebook as compared to in their native apps or (I imagine) in a hard copy of the novel, but the rewards are definitely there. On the whole, this is a funny and smart novel and it was satisfying to me in ways that I can find individually in separate books, but not as often all in the same book.

I received a digital copy of this book thanks to NetGalley and the publisher in return for an honest review. My thoughts are my own, and I pre-ordered a hard copy to keep.

This book is certainly social commentary, It is well researched and well done. I rarely highlight beautiful insightful sentences, but I highlighted half a dozen in this one.

I will miss these characters. I will miss Julian the most. It’s not that I liked them particularly. It’s more that these characters reflect parts of our younger selves. I was transported back to an earlier time. The characters are refreshing in some respects. Ms. Joukovsky does a good job of reflecting different opinions, especially in her exchanges between Julian and Wes.

I enjoyed the email and text exchanges within the pages of Portrait.. It was an interesting diversion from an otherwise elegant narrative. It gave the Portrait a modern element, However, I found myself distracted, double checking the dates and headers in case any of that should matter. Turns out it didn’t.

An enhancing dimension of this book is it’s Instagram account. I’ve never read a book with its own Instagram account. With it, Portrait seemingly seeped from page into reality, peppering my real-life feed with commentary about Portrait. I loved this. At times, reading Portrait felt like watching a reality tv show- without the guilt and with an intellectual element.

Sometimes the big words in this book were distracting and felt a bit forced. Other times it enhanced the expérience.

I am not familiar with any of the Greek myths, but still enjoyed Portrait of a Mirror. I suspect a familiarity with these myths too would enhance any reader’s experience.

Portrait did leave me asking for more. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps this is what makes it so good. Ms. Joukovsky says it best:

« Of all the dangers in life, there is perhaps none more treacherous than getting precisely what you want. As it has been said, the mistakes we male and female mortals make when we have our own way persist in raising wonder at our fondness of it. For unbought dresses can never be stained. Uneaten food doesn’t make you fat, and unconsumed alcohol won’t give you a hangover. Only unwritten novels are perfect. »

Portrait of a Mirror is better precisely because it ends when it does. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t love a sequel.

I never read books twice, but this may be the exception. It seems there might be more layers to unravel upon a second reading. Bravo, Ms. Joukovsky, Bravo.

Summary: 'The Portrait of a Mirror' is based on the myth of Narcissus and takes place between two young couples whose lives cross paths over one summer.

Thoughts: A 3.5 star read for me.

I believe the author has set out to make the characters in this story caricatures - a stereotype of privileged, self-involved, wealthy, beautiful and therefore ultimately completely unrelatable people. I don't think as readers we are supposed to relate to the protagonists, though perhaps we are supposed to see parts of ourselves reflected in them. I believe we are supposed to see them as a little ridiculous rather than sympathise with them. If this is the case, I think the book completely achieves what it sets out to do.

The writing reminded me of Donna Tartt's 'The Goldfinch' - not that the plot is anything alike, but it was more the type of characters along with the writing style itself; intelligent, embellished, complex. I liked how humour was woven into this and did find the dialogue believable - even if I didn't like the characters, I could visualise them.

The outcome is a little predictable, but I don't think the purpose was to give any surprises. As a character-driven story, it's all about the journey and unravelling the events of the summer.

A criticism is that I didn't feel the mixed media type of entries (the emails, Instagram comments, etc) added anything to the story. I ended up skim reading these sections and don't feel that I missed anything as a result - these sections do add a bit of exposition, but not enough to be vital in my opinion. Maybe if I had read a physical copy where the layout was a bit clearer I would've taken more time to read these parts.

Overall a clever and thought-provoking book.