dnf at 31%. some interesting ideas but i knew i wasn’t gonna click with this after the first three essays. tolentino’s scope just feels incredibly limited and kneecapped by her own middle-class millennial american slant, and the actual conclusion of the essays feel unearned, always stopping at “here’s my crazy experience” without properly assessing any implications outside of tolentino’s bubble.

This is an old school book. Like "they don't write books like this anymore". It is long and deep and slow and introspective. You get a close first person perspective of one woman. Alice is a fictional person based loosely on Laura Bush. We follow her through her youth to her marriage to the charismatic Charlie and then see her in a day in the life of the FLOTUS. It is a great character study.

All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players

I'm seeing a lot of misguided criticism in the forum and the reviews for this book! Am I here to tell you you're wrong? Yes, and I'm sorry. I'm also going to keep this review spoiler free, which means I'm not going to get to comment fully on my interpretation of the ending, but alas.

This book does not provide a straightforward narrative, nor does it provide a strong character or character development. That's not the point! And I'm going to convince you that that works for what Kitamura is doing (or what I think she's doing, because she's probably working on a much higher level than I was able to grasp).

Early on in the book, the (unnamed) narrator remarks to herself that the way her husband asked a question was "both direct and distressingly oblique." That is a perfect description of this novel. The prose itself is clear and sparse; Kitamura provides neat descriptions of what appear to be very normal human interactions and experiences. When they are all put together in this book, everything ceases to make sense.

The reader is left questioning what they just read. Was it two parallel stories sewn together? Was it a book from the perspective of a delusional character? Was it both?

However, Kitamura is not intending for the narrative arc to be the vehicle for her commentary. In this way, Audition is a commentary on the boundaries imposed on the novel as a form. Why must the author be restricted to the same constraints of time and space that reality is? Is not a (or the) point of art to comment on life by pushing the limits of what life itself can be? By working outside of these constraints, Kitamura is able to play with character in a way that straightforward narratives simply cannot. We can see characters in different roles and interrogate how different lives(??) would mould them.

This is not a character study, but a study of character. I saw some people complaining about the long monologue about performance near the middle of the novel. That was one of the most important parts of the book! At one point the character remarks to herself:

There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the
narrative around it, and the boundary
between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.

In this novel, performance refers not only to the narrator's career as an actress, but also to the performance of life itself. We are all, at every moment, playing a character, both to the world and to ourselves. In different situations and relationships, we play different roles. We are constantly being reframed and reshaped by our externalities. Who then, are we really? Who is anyone?

If you want to question your own existence, pick up this book! If you are looking for plot or for character development, you will not find it here. And that is not a flaw.

4.5 ⭐️ | This was such an unsettling and atmospheric read and I am so impressed that this is a debut author.

While this is categorized as horror, I think readers will have the best experience going in expecting something closer to literary fiction with elements of folk horror. This is a very slow-moving, character-driven novel, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. The plot is moving exactly as it intends to. There isn’t a lot of traditional “action,” and much of the horror remains quietly in the background until the pieces begin coming together toward the end.

The Welsh setting is also such an important part of the novel. Wales never feels like a backdrop. It feels inseparable from the story itself. There’s so much love for the landscape, history, and culture woven into the book. That connection to place becomes especially powerful as the novel explores the idea of the land as something ancient and almost sacred in its own right.

And that’s where the horror really worked for me. There’s something ancient lurking beneath this story. A sense of the land holding something that predates organized religion, perhaps even something far older than humanity. The book never gives you easy answers about what exactly is calling to these characters or why, and I loved that ambiguity. It feels unknowable in a way that makes it genuinely unsettling.

This may not work for every reader but for readers who love deeply atmospheric settings, and slow, creeping folk horror that is content to leave some mysteries unexplained, I think this could be something really special.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I found this fast paced but unsettling. It forces one to look at our dependence on technology as it ruins our natural habitat and even affects how we interact with ourselves and one another.

📱/🎧 I wanted so much more out of this book! I don't believe the MC is a confidently written, solid, character. She was unhinged but her reasoning (even lack of it) just wasn't there. As a reader, I never felt "in the mind" of the MC and truly felt disconnected from "why" these things were happening. The plot was slow. I wanted so much more to happen, and when it did, I wasn't sure if it was happening because so much was just a dream. Then I got annoyed because there was a lack of any true explanation to the violence that had occurred. A lot of chapters end in these summaries that sound like lessons from Aesop's Fables for Children? Multiple times I was like, "Yeah I just read that in the chapter?" As others have stated, the descriptions are not believable and do take you out of the moment. I wanted to feel disgusted and instead felt confused because the descriptions made no sense. The audiobook narrator makes a noise with her mouth (I believe that's what it is) constantly throughout the audiobook. You can often hear her lips. If you are alone, in a quiet room, and smile with your teeth that's the same noise her mouth made consistently. It did distract me in the audiobook and drove me crazy. She also somehow made a ~300 page book WAY longer than it should've been because she reads like she is reading to a child, slow and with long pauses.

Great premise for a retelling of the classic Frankenstein during the american invasion of Iraq. Sadly, I didn't feel like the book delivered on it's promise.

Jumping between a handful of POV's, the central conflict became unclear and nothing was resolved in a way that I found particularly satisfying. The writing itself was very matter of fact, which I usually am a big fan of, but I ended up missing something that could draw me further into the text rather than just more plot. Overall, the first half was great, but the second half fizzled out and frankly left me a bit bored at the end.