I mean this in the best way possible: at no point while reading this book did I have a single clue where it was going.

Imogen Crimp's almost stream-of-consciousness writing style pulls you into our narrator's world immediately. The plot moves incredibly quickly and yet somehow lingers. And, though we have a direct window into every thought, insecurity, and question our main character Ruby has, she somehow still maintains a distance from us. She lets us into what would seem to be her most secretive and vulnerable thoughts, but yet keeps others just out of reach.

Set against what could and should otherwise be an absolutely dreamy setting- a beautiful, sprawling home in the quiet English countryside- a prolonged and suffocating heat wave and the ever-present feeling of something awful waiting just behind every door sets the themes and atmosphere of the story up perfectly. A dream mentorship, a dreamy home, and a dreamlike (but all too real) mysterious daughter could easily fill several hundred pages of any number of emotionally lighter genres with a guaranteed happy ending. But Imogen Crimp is masterful at using these pieces to create an altogether different puzzle than one might expect.

This book, much like the heat wave it takes place during, will linger with me for a long time. This is the sort of story that fills empty spaces in your mind you didn't realize were there, waiting until some new experience bumps up against them, reminding you of it.

Thank you to Henry Holt & Company for the ARC!

The epitome of literary fiction, this book just meanders along with a primarily inner dialogue, truly inscrutable characters, and no clear climax. What kind of manipulation and/or mind-games are going on? Ruby, a 30-year old aspiring director, stays at the palatial country home of a famous female director, Ellen, for a couple of weeks under the auspices of being mentored. Lara, Ellen's 20yo daughter, is there too, though, and the weeks don't go quite as Ruby expected.
Ruby is a likeable character for me. She's trying to figure out her career and what she wants from her personal life. She's insecure, at least in Ellen's presence (and Lara's for that matter), and she's never heard a silence she didn't feel compelled to fill. Relatable. Ellen seems like she's trying to inject her own (questionable?) notions of feminism into Ruby's work and psyche, and she is quite the manipulator, so I'm not a fan. Lara is an enigma in part because we don't know exactly why she left school or what she really wants out of her summer at home.
The writing is lovely. One of the early sentences caught my eye: "the light, which now poured through the double-height windows in Ellen's hallway and into my uncaffeinated skull - which rubbed itself all over the woven runner". I loved that image; as if the light was a cat rubbing itself on the carpet to make it its own. The author successfully conveyed the feel of this overheated summer, the shimmery ethereal quality of the heat and how it affected and contributed to Ruby's experiences and later reflections on her experiences. I was surprised by the end; I was expecting something and didn't get it, but I'm not mad about it.
I would 100%. recommend this book.