I really tried to like this book. I will add a content warning right up front that SA of a child is referenced. This is supposed to be a thriller that also focuses on feminism. It really is a deep, intense book, and perhaps I wanted a bit more of a lighthearted thriller. However, perhaps I was not the target demographic for the book. It just felt like it was more conflict than necessary, and I found Tessa to be an incredibly frustration character.

I still want to thank NetGalley and the Grove Atlantic for the ARC and the opportunity to give an honest review.

A short, complex look at a complicated love triangle among the intellectual elite. I was impressed by Craig’s writing but it also felt impenetrable in a lot of ways. The story is twisty and the characters deep, but I didn’t connect to the book as much as I hoped.

Oh, my goodness. It's hard to find the words that would adequately describe this book. It's beautiful and haunting and I couldn't stop thinking about it once I finished it.

My Nemesis by Charmaine Craig is both straightforward (in terms of concept and structure) and marvelously complex (in terms of the Camus lens, and Craig’s choice of perspective).

The protagonist is Tessa, a successful female writer who develops a friendship, first by correspondence and then in person, with Charlie, a philosopher and scholar based. As it happens, Charlie is extremely attractive. Sparks fly as they exchange ideas about Camus and masculine desire, and their intellectual connection promises more but their spouses are the obstacle.

…to be drawn into Charlie’s world was to become part of a very deep and ongoing conversation, to be pulled along the currents of his innermost thoughts and conflicts, and to be attended to intimately in ways of the heart and mind – and soul, if I’m honest. I had only to send or say three or four words to him for the faucet of his intimacy to turn on.

Tessa’s husband, Milton enjoys Charlie’s company on his visits to the East Coast, however Charlie’s mixed-race Asian wife, Wah, is not so comfortable with Tessa. Wah’s traditional femininity and subservience to her husband strikes Tessa as weakness, and she scoffs at the sacrifices Wah makes as adoptive mother to a Burmese girl, Htet. But Wah is not easily dismissed – she is intelligent, coolly confident, and holds her ground on issues that are important to her – most unsettling for Tessa.

Even the erratic smiling glances she cast me as we rolled our bags toward their car seemed to communicate her capacity to see straight through to the worst of me or to the future in which I’d already begun to ruin their lives.

One night, during an alcohol-fuelled discussion, Tessa declares that Wah is ‘an insult to womankind’. The story begins with this moment, and moves back and forth in time to examine the lead-up and the fallout.

I class this book as a ‘moral thriller’ – the ‘action’ is predominantly emotional and focused on moments of self-reflection. But what Craig has done very cleverly is create a character in Tessa who is opinionated and self-righteous AND has these glaring blind-spots.

There are those who can’t keep sight of themselves and those who can’t keep themselves out of their own sight.

The reader sees the blind-spots and flaws, and so you anticipate the moments when ‘intellectually smart’ Tessa might realise that she’s lacking. The net result is an exquisite level of tension throughout the book, carefully layered with Tessa’s pontificating about Camus, Nietzsche, motherhood and femininity.

There are times when I can’t distinguish my habit of honesty from brutality. The look on Charlie’s face then was harrowing, broken and shamed. I suppose if I’d been a more ‘feminine’ woman, someone willing to sacrifice her sense of truth for his masculine pride, I would have immediately found a way to recant my diagnosis or to apologize.

I am not familiar with the work of Camus and therefore can’t comment on that aspect of the book, however, I appreciated the way that the robust intellectual debates between Tessa and Charlie provided interesting parallels to what was happening in their family lives. And all of this is achieved in a mere 200 pages.

I received my copy of My Nemesis from the publisher, Grove Atlantic, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

3.5/5

My Nemesis is described by the publisher as a story of rivalry between women, seduction and envy, and elsewhere as a psychological thriller.

I strongly disliked this book. From the start, where the reader enters in media res, I felt I was lost and missing information; unfortunately, I never seemed to catch up. I didn’t find any of the characters appealing and the plot, or what passes for it, was not captivating.

I definitely wouldn’t call this is a psychological thriller, it’s rather a slow story without much excitement.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

There's really no going back from calling someone an insult to womankind and meaning it. But how do you even get there? And how do you actually move past it? My Nemesis tackles not just that, but presents an absolutely eviscerating take on ideas of womanhood. Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

One of the hardest lessons I learned when I became a Feminist is that many things are no longer fun once you've gained a new perspective. It became worse once my awareness became more intersectional and I realised I'm also part of the problem. The reason I'm starting with this is because Tessa felt like a walking advertisement about the way some Feminists turn into the worst kind of people. My Nemesis is as much a satire upon White Feminism, as it is an interrogation of the Memoir genre. Every other week, it seems, some memoir piece written for some magazine goes viral, with the life of someone laid bare to the reader. The reason these often go viral is because there is the distance between how aware the author thinks they are and how non-aware they are about how they come across. This distance in perception is something that comes across beautifully in My Nemesis with Tessa, who thinks so much of herself and betrays so much about how she actually is without seemingly meaning to. She is incredibly enticing as a narrator because from the beginning you know she's not a great person, but it's like a slow trainwreck, it's impossible to look away.

My Nemesis starts with the confrontation itself, with Tessa calling Wah an insult to womankind. This novel is almost Tessa's mea culpa, in which she at once tries to justify herself and yet also is trying really hard to be honest about how she got to where she got. So Tessa tells us about the beginnings of her friendship with Charlie, her own obsession with him, her failed first marriage, her tenuous second one, her strained relationship with her daughter, and her consistent nagging about Wah. We see how Tessa interprets Wah's actions, how she glosses over her own wrongdoings, and how she then backtracks and actually spills some truth about herself. We also find out what happened after the confrontation, as Tessa is writing it herself. This may feel like an odd way to summarise the novel, but that is because it honestly is hard to really encompass it. My Nemesis is a novel that interrogates feminism, race, class, motherhood, and womanhood, all through the lens of memoir and letter writing. Because we only get to see things through Tessa's eyes, we only get a limited view of the other characters. But we know that is what happening; we know we are being misled, perhaps unintentionally, so we can't get too lost in Tessa's own ideas.

My Nemesis was everywhere at the beginning of the year, in large part, it felt to me, because of the shocking beginning and premise. Charmaine Craig pulls no punches and shows Tessa, Charlie, Wah, and Milton from their worst angles, as well as from some kinder ones... sometimes. Tessa is the worst, but seeing what she got up to and how she tried to justify herself felt like a rush. Wah is such a cipher, with other characters constantly projecting things onto her, while she tries to take self-denial to the next level. There is also the fact that the novel plays with so many other themes. Race is a massive elephant in the room throughout the novel, addressed but never properly dealt with by Tessa. The stereotype of the submissive Asian woman is incredibly damaging and the way My Nemesis deals with it is very interesting. It does at times feel like Craig was taking too many things on board at once, which don't get as much attention or time to breathe as they should. There are so many extra details, side plots, and side characters which feel relevant but disappear too quickly. In a way that makes sense, because we're getting Tessa's perspective. But I did feel kind of left high and dry when My Nemesis ended. It was a whirlwind experience, however, and it did make me re-investigate some of my own biases and feminist attitudes.

I still can't quite believe how gripped I was by My Nemesis. I was literally on edge throughout, at once hating Tessa, then understanding her, then wondering at Wah, and then feeling sorry for her. While there was a little too much going on, I did really like this novel and would wholeheartedly recommend it.

This was unique; at least it was definitely somewhat of a new experience for me.

If you enjoy an unreliable narrator (or even a dislikable one) then this is going to be up your alley.

Our narrator, Tessa, is selfish, cruel, and just pretty downright insufferable.
She is a middle-aged woman with an older daughter, Nora, whose father she divorced. Nora grew up with her father as the main parental figure, due in large part to Tessa's lack of motherly attachment. Nora has resented Tessa for most of her life, and this is the core of her largest insecurity: failing at being a woman.
Obviously, being a woman cannot be defined by one trait, and Tessa knows this, but that doesn't stop her from being maddened by her inability to be a selfless mother and partner.

She reaches her tipping point when she becomes acquainted with Charlie, a fellow scholar and writer, and his wife, Wah.
Wah has also written a book, a memoir you could say, of how she came to adopt her daughter, Htet.

Tessa cannot stand this woman. She cannot stand her because she perceives her as the epitome of a selfless mother—a woman who craved to have a child, and chose to adopt a girl who went through hell and back, and now gives her a life of unconditional love and nurture.
But, of course, Tessa never gives her praise. She finds every single way to ridicule Wah in all the ways that they are different—perhaps in all the ways that Tessa knows Wah is just a better, kinder person.

The entire novel is essentially Tessa recounting how she came to loathe Wah and pin her as everything she believes is wrong with society's construct of gender norms.

This book is very self aware. And by that I mean this: it was very clear from the jump that we aren't supposed to trust or like Tessa. Her narration is a very specific, snarky, and snobby tone all throughout, and this is purposeful and effective. I didn't enjoy Tessa as a character, but I knew I was supposed to be critical of her, therefore it was entertaining to be inside her head. Interwoven in this story of obsession is social commentary on womanhood, motherhood, philosophy, selfishness, ego, and just reflecting on why how we treat others matter, even if some don't seem to think so.

There is a small mystery element to all of this as well, because this is written in second person, but not to the reader in general. It's written to a specific person, and you have to keep reading to find out who Tessa could possibly be writing all this for.

All in all, this was maddening and intriguing at the same time. This could've gotten a four star from me if I felt it amounted to something more. I didn't necessarily dislike the ending (to be honest I didn't have any concrete hypotheses on how this would end), but the overall arc of the story felt a bit underwhelming.

I would definitely pick something else up by this author though.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for an ARC in exchange for my honest review!

A quit and uncomfortable book. I greatly enjoyed the language...not so much the plot, but I understand that it's not the point, though it's billed as a work of suspense. It's extremely well-written and fascinating, and if you're down with evil characters, you'll love this. Also this influenced me to read more Camus.

In this psychological novel, Tessa, our middle-aged, white, intellectual narrator, has a crush on Charlie, a younger, handsome professor. Charlie is unhappily married to Wah and enjoys his philosophical discussions with Tessa deep into the night.

From the first sentence of the book it is clear that Tessa dislikes Wah's servile attitude:

"When I accused Wah of being an insult to women—“an insult to womankind” was my unfortunate phrase— we were sitting with our husbands at a fashionable rooftop restaurant in downtown Los Angeles."

Tessa's unwavering beliefs and modern principles, for instance in feminism, make her both imperious and unlikable as a character, but is she as cold-hearted as she seems?

Refreshing your Camus and Nietzsche before reading is a good idea, as they represent the nihilistic bases that shape Tessa's and Charlie's respective worldviews.

But when reality kicks in, when life kicks in - in the form of desire, or abuse, or inequality - how much is one's theoretical framework worth? Or do we just use our principles to justify our own behavior and weaknesses?

Anyway, that is about as far as I got, but there is much more to unpack in this short novel. It has something of Katie Kitamura, 'The Guest Lecture', 'Biography of X', 'White on White', but I found those slightly more accessible than this one. There are strong parts, especially towards the end, but admittedly some of it went over my head (in particular the parts I listened to on audio).

Thank you to netgalley, the author and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I'm rating this book 3 stars after my first read. The problem I have with it is the fact that I don't understand the story, I blame this on my own limited intellectual capabilities rather than being the fault of the writer. Last thing I would want is for books to dumb themselves down to appeal to a wider audience. So this rating might be underrated to the true value of the book but it helps me to keep track of how my perception changes in case I decide to read it again in the future.

"Regrettably, the promising themes — attraction, identity, rivalry, betrayal and the seemingly Sisyphean quest for creative and interpersonal fulfillment — become mired in a series of distracting subplots about children, neighbors, suspected arson, and an affection for the French existentialist."

As far as character dynamics and relationships go, the two couples were doomed by proximity rather than doomed by the narrative, the latter which I prefer more. So my neutrality towards this novel could be due to differing tastes or underwhelming disinterest. Finishing such a hook for the sake of reviewing it and distancing myself from Camus in the eyes of... well, an unmemorable narrator and emotional borderline intellectual affair.

I was drawn into this book because of the themes explored within the novel--betrayal, rivalry, identity--and the author's previous work. Also was intrigued by this cover!! A solid and interesting read, if not one of my more favored ones.

Thank you for the e-ARC, NetGalley and dear publisher.

The book is hard to follow, the whole stuff feels like a random conversation being thrown altogether and makes it look like someone is babbling throughout the book.

Charmaine Craig elegantly wrestles with the notion of rivalry between women in “My Nemesis,” an erudite novel about a woman in love with another woman’s husband.

Tessa, a white scholar of Camus and a successful author, falls for Charlie, a stimulating philosopher in Los Angeles. Their relationship begins innocently enough in a platonic exchange of letters that Tessa shares with her husband, Milton. The two of them become regular houseguests at each others’ homes despite the fact that Tessa says something untenably rude to Charlie’s Asian wife Wah shortly after meeting her. “I’d never been able to read Wah, and I still don’t believe that it was a matter merely of culture or ethnicity. Sure, as our current ethos would have it, she was a ‘person of mixed race,’ something that might have contributed, beyond her unusual look, to the confusion of her submissive and queenlike demeanor. Though I don’t think even her relatives could have told you if her general mode of quietness was due to a timidity on her part or a righteousness that kept her at remove from other; I don’t think anyone knew if she tended to smile courteously during conversations with that supple mouth of hers because she was incapable of keeping pace with our ideas or privately counting the ways those ideas were imbecilic.”

Everything Wah does aggravates Tessa, particularly when it comes to Charlie and Wah’s adopted daughter, Htet. Now a fifteen year-old, Htet was sold by her Burmese family to Malaysian traffickers when she was very young and suffered a terrible childhood until she was rescued by a kindly nun, and was eventually adopted by Wah. It’s Wah’s selflessness and abnegation that disgusts Tessa most of all, who flirts with her husband after dinner while Wah does the dishes. As Tessa moves back and forth between her home on the East Coast and Charlie and Wah’s home in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Los Angeles, she machinates over how to maintain Charlie’s attention and unleash the power Wah has over both him and herself.

Their Craftsman house, surrounded by crumbling Victorians, becomes another point of contention, because a young homeless boy is sheltering next door. Htet and Wah are trying to help the boy, but Charlie works against them by involving the landlord and the police. Craig deftly skewers the way some white people merely puppet support of underrepresented groups while releasing themselves from all guilt and obligation. “He’ll be fine,” Charlie says of the homeless boy next door, before returning to Nietzsche. While Wah is obviously not perfect, she’s nearly a caricature of a saint compared to the Camus-quoting, husband-nabbing Tessa. Perhaps that’s why Craig returns again and again to the theme of Sisyphus, a subject Camus studied, and his horrible fate of rolling that boulder up the mountain day after day. Are women fated to find nemeses in the most ridiculous of places—other women? In addition to the animosity between Tessa and Wah, each has a conflict with her daughter, Wah with the rebellious Htet, and Tessa with her long-suffering daughter Nora. Meanwhile, the reader may well wonder, what’s so great about this guy Charlie? His rugged handsomeness and proclivity to quote Nietzsche? Craig’s literary talents cannot be denied in this thoughtful examination of rivalry between women, class differences and empathy.

“My Nemesis”
By Charmaine Craig
Grove Press, 208 pages

"When I accused Wah of being an insult to women--'an insult to womankind' was my unfortunate phrase--we were sitting with out husbands at a fashionable rooftop restaurant in downtown Los Angeles."

My Nemesis is a perfect cocktail of a novel, an impressive and skilful mix of cerebral and soapy, of intimate character study and juicy drama, of intellectual discussions and petty personal grudges.

For better or worse, the linchpin of My Nemesis is Tessa, a white, middle-aged writer who has made a career of engaging with and examining her life, particularly her marriages, from a feminist viewpoint. And frankly, nothing is more fitting than Tessa being the main character of this book because she already believes she is the main character of everyone else's lives. Highly educated, opinionated, and forthright, Tessa has shaped her beliefs and principles around feminist--and, to a lesser extent, existential--inquiry, alive to the ways in which she, as a woman, has been marginalized within the various spheres of her life (her relationships, her family, her work). This is all well and good, except that all of these characteristics that define Tessa are precisely the ones that make her such a flawed and parochial character (more on that later).

The other central female character of My Nemesis is Wah, the wife of Charlie, Tessa's scholar friend (and the object of her growing preoccupation/infatuation). And if Tessa is a fascinating character because we get to directly witness the lengths she'll go to to excuse and justify her behaviour, then Wah is a fascinating character precisely because we don't directly witness much of her at all. That is, because My Nemesis is Tessa's narrative, the version of Wah that we get is one who exists solely in relation to Tessa--and Tessa is an unreliable narrator when it comes to Wah, to put it lightly. She sees Wah as the antithesis of modern, enlightened womanhood, repelled by what she perceives as Wah's "traditional" and backwards femininity: her modesty, her emotional openness, her accommodating nature. Of course, for all her supposed intellectual rigour, Tessa continually elides the fact that her reading of Wah, a mixed-race Asian woman, very much feeds into, and cannot be divorced from, the ways in which Asian women have been historically stereotyped (as subservient, weak, docile). Tessa makes Wah out to be everything that she is not: if Wah is demure, Tessa is outspoken; if Wah is self-abnegating, Tessa is individualistic. In other words, Wah becomes a kind of prop for Tessa, someone she can use to bring herself--the Good Feminist Woman--into relief, someone she can treat as Exhibit A to make a point about womanhood or feminism, someone she can denigrate in order to aggrandize her own self--and someone upon whom she can pile all these supposedly feminist critiques when, in reality, she is extremely threatened by her.

What makes My Nemesis such an effective novel for me is how it is able to render a character who is at once a specific individual in their own right and yet also emblematic of a particular kind of individual--in this case, the privileged, self-absorbed academic. Throughout the novel, we see how Tessa's narrative speaks to a certain brand of white feminism that is not concerned with feminism as any kind of moral or ethical framework attuned to women's marginalization and inequity, but rather sees it as a blunt tool that can be weaponized to protect the individual woman--that is, Tessa herself. In a very practical sense, Tessa's feminism is useful to her because she can leverage it not only to excuse any number of perceived critiques of her person, but to validate her own petty critiques of other women.

Yet even with all of this in mind, the novel works not despite Tessa's flaws, but because of them. She is a character you can (and do) dislike, but she is never one you can discount--and therein lies the skill of Charmaine Craig's writing: she is able to write a character who is engaging even as she is selfish, petty, and abrasive. The narrative, we are told, is Tessa's attempt to come to terms with what happened when she and her husband became embroiled with Wah, her husband Charlie, and their adopted daughter Htet. We don't precisely know what happened, but Tessa tells us that she knows that she behaved poorly, and that she was not as self-aware as she had believed herself to be. My Nemesis, then, is Tessa's attempt not just to explain her behaviour, but also to critically interrogate it and recognize the ways in which it was biased, self-serving, unwarranted, unfair. Of course, self-awareness can only go so far--to be aware of having done something is exactly that: awareness. In fact, in many ways, Tessa's self-awareness only serves to make her complacent: if she can call out her own hypocrisies, then no one else can; she can claim to have done her due diligence by acknowledging awareness of her bad behaviour without actually acting to change it or question its underlying motives. But even as Tessa is complacent, even as she makes excuses and circumvents issues, you still get the sense that she is genuinely trying: trying to evaluate herself, to reexamine her behaviour in a new light. Her attempts may be insufficient or elementary or long overdue, but they are attempts to be sure, and ultimately that's what kept me so invested in Tessa and her story. (You know that TikTok sound that's like "Is it me? Am I the drama?"? That's basically Tessa's character arc in a nutshell.)

If you've made it all the way to the end of this very long review, then you can probably tell that My Nemesis is a novel that gave me so much to think about. It's such an incisive, biting book, complete with an unreliable narrator who, for all her many flaws, still manages to be so engaging. A novel like this is always a tricky balancing act: the narrator has to be flawed enough to be unlikable, but also not so flawed that they become a caricature; they have to feel like they're genuinely grappling--or trying to grapple--with their flaws, but also not so much that the story becomes an afterschool special about them Learning Their Lesson. More than anything, that narrator needs to have a strong sense of interiority; I don't need to condone or agree with their actions, but I need to understand them. It's such a feat, then, that Charmaine Craig manages to pull it all off, and in 200 pages no less.

For all its nuanced ideas and rhetorical explorations, My Nemesis is also about what happens when all that intellectual veneer is stripped away to reveal your garden-variety pettiness, selfishness, contempt, and insecurity. And reader, I. ate. it. all. up.

Thanks so much to Grove Atlantic for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!

A book I was immediately drawn into a novella short but powerful.Tessa with her jealousy nastiness kept me turning the pages.Looking forward to more by this author.#netgalley #groveatlantic

this was a bit boring and rambly. i appreciated its attempt at nuance, but ultimately, that's all it was. an Attempt.

What really stood out to me about this book was the cover. I was so intrigued by it. Sadly, the book was a no for me. Given it was only a little over 200 pages I decided to finish it. I was almost a DNF though. You cannot deny the writing is very well done, but it felt almost too literary maybe? Or just kind of dull and dry. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for a honest review.

Absolutely obsessed! I devoured this book in two days. I need to gather more of my thoughts and will update my review in the coming days but for now I’ll say:

-loved the complex characters, Tessa was both fascinating and infuriating
-The philosophical conversations at first made me feel disconnected and things went above my head a little. But by 20% I was considering the questions posed and made many notes (which I don’t normally do with ebooks)!

𝑵𝒐𝒘, 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒍𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒘𝒂𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐 𝒃𝒍𝒐𝒘 𝒖𝒑 𝒐𝒏𝒆’𝒔 𝒍𝒊𝒇𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒉 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒊𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒂𝒍𝒔𝒐 𝒓𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒆.

Tessa and Charlie begin a correspondence when he sends a response to her essay about the relevance of Camus. She feels, through his intelligence and flattery, that their ‘minds could keep a certain, rare company’. She discovers he is a published philosophy professor at a research university near L.A., and it doesn’t hurt that he is a sexy middle-aged man. She includes her own husband, Milton, in the letters and they become a trio. Then there is the wife, the ‘fourth person’ Tessa would rather didn’t exist at all. The flippant attitude Tessa has about Charlie and his wife Wah’s twenty-year marriage reveals a lot about her character from the start. She points out herself that she is aware of having a problem with where to lay blame, while also exonerating herself for her outbursts or failing interactions with others. In fact, her own daughter rejects her. Tessa’s perceptions betray her, and she falls deep into Charlie’s reality. She holds Wah’s ethnicity against her, as if some cultural clash is the cause of her failure to be the wife Charlie needs. Tessa is a feminist, yet with distaste mocks Wah’s intelligence, accomplishments and worse, her familial arrangement with their adopted Burmese daughter, Htet. Htet is a victim of child trafficking, and Tessa has opinions on that as well. Tessa and Charlie’s correspondence crosses a boundary when he first shares his marital problems, naturally she thinks Wah isn’t worthy of him. When Tessa and Milton visit Charlie, she sees Wah as subservient, assigning some sort of motives on her to appear like a suffering wife, when in fact Tessa is the interloper. I love it, there is something diabolical in Tessa’s pompous thinking, and Charmaine Craig has created this perfect disaster.

Tessa has a narrative in her head about Wah and never imagines for a moment that there are bigger things in her world than Tessa’s presence. We already know there is something illicit between Tessa and Charlie, a sort of blurring of the lines of innocent friendship. Of course, she has blame to shoulder, regardless of what she wishes to convince herself and the reader. Why is Wah her nemesis anyway? Why does she call her ‘an insult to womankind’ and what makes her the authority on ‘womankind’? Tessa even takes offense at her economic struggles, as if it’s some sort of scheme to appear noble. Wah seems to be raising Htet without much help from her husband Charlie, it’s a strange situation. Why is Tessa so obsessed with their domestic dramas? There are a few lines that expose Tessa, “She could never simply agree with me, Wah. She always had to push back with some idea that threw a moral shadow onto mine- and then retreat…” What a strange thought for a woman who claims another is weak. There is something superficial about her, for someone who comes off as such an intellectual snob, she misses a lot. She almost seems to hate women herself.

Tessa insinuates herself deeply in Charlie, Wah and Htet’s lives that nothing, but chaos can descend. This is quite a tale, one full of provocative questions about feminine virtues, loyalty, marriage, friendship, envy, and motherhood. It is about cruelty; how cruel women can be to each other. This novel went places I didn’t expect, it is combative and painful with tragic twists. It exposes the arrogance those on their moral, intellectual high ground embody. Intense. Yes, read it! There is so much more I’d love to unravel but I don’t want to give the story away.

Publication Date: February 7, 2023 Available Now

Grove Atlantic

Grove Press