This had all the ingredients to make a great book; 1970s, the art-world, feminism, a mystery and apparently based on du Maurier‘s Rebecca. I liked it, but only just.


There were two many elements that didn‘t quite work, so I never felt myself really drawn in. I can‘t put my finger on exactly what (other than the ending that was too far in the future and too exposition-y) so maybe it was me rather than the book.

Set in the heat of California Iwas drawn right in by the story the mystery the well written characters.A book I wil be recommending and a new author I will be following.#netgalley #scribeuk

A wild trippy hayride of mystery including art, love, gender, sex, identity, and so much more. I totally hooked from the first page. The characters are really well built and story immersive however the author could not execute the end with a proper mystery as was alluded in the blurb. So the ending is a bit dissapointing. Otherwise, very nice read.

Utopia is a marvel. Vividly beguiling on art, love, and what it means to be alive, every page thrums with magic. This one kept me hooked and entertained until the last page…

Heidi Sopinka’s novel’s steeped in the artworld of the 1970s, with a focus on the women who pioneered radical forms of performance art. The story with its echoes of Rebecca centres on Paz, a young painter at the start of her career who marries older, highly-acclaimed art star Billy. Now she’s alone in a house in L.A. looking after his young daughter while Billy’s away on tour. But she’s increasingly weighed down by obsessive thoughts of his first wife Romy, a revered, performance artist who died in mysterious, possibly sinister, circumstances.

Sopinka’s depiction of artistic movements in the 1970s is well-researched. The nature of Romy’s death and subsequent events are an intriguing take on the real-life scandal surrounding sculptor Carl Andre who was arrested, and later acquitted, for the alleged murder of his wife, prominent performance artist and photographer, Ana Mendieta. Mendieta’s since become an iconic figure. Rather like Sylvia Plath in the field of literature, Mendieta’s a potent, feminist symbol whose experiences and tragic end have been viewed as encapsulating the oppressive nature of the artworld for women practitioners. Sopinka’s narrative explores linked questions around women and creativity, the privileging of men’s work by galleries and critics, as well as more intimate issues around jealousy, toxic masculinity, sexual freedom and the challenges of parenting in a system that automatically sidelines mothers.

The setting, the hint of du Maurier, the numerous references to women artists should have made this the perfect book for me, but somehow, I just failed to fully connect with this. There are some excellent stretches of prose, and the questions raised were relevant ones, but I never felt that the characters, particularly Paz, fully came to life. And at times I really struggled. There was something just a little too self-conscious and too claustrophobic for me about the overall style and the treatment of Paz’s story. Information was sometimes introduced too abruptly yet the pace could feel excruciatingly slow, and the ending set far into the future just didn’t fully convince. In the end it was a book I wanted to like far more than I actually did. Although this is obviously my personal reaction, a number of other reviewers have had more positive responses.

Utopia is a book that on paper checks many of my boxes:
- Centres art/art theory/artists
- Is interwoven with feminist themes
- Contains a mystery
- Has a narrator who is unreliable for whatever reason

However this book did not quite work for me and I think that is a subjective thing rather than the book being objectively bad.

I'm beginning to realise that I prefer longer narratives. This book is less than 250 pages which made it difficult for me personally to really engage with the characters. I am well aware though that there are readers out there who love this style of story telling and don't like overly descriptive writing. Unfortunately for me it stopped me caring about the story and ultimately not wanting to pick it up to carry on.

For the right reader I can see this being an absolute favourite because you could read and reread this and pick out new things each time. I could also see it being an absolutely brilliant book to study for an English Literature course (I'm rather interested in the types of book studied at GSCE and A-Level in the UK and could really see the merit in this being a book used for that purpose).

I think Heidi Sopinka is a really talented writer and I will be keeping my eye out for future books from her in case she comes out with anything longer. I've read reviews for her previous novel but fear the writing would not suit me either.

I think this may interest fans of Lote by Shola Von Reinhold, The Emperor Waltz by Philip Hensher, Tentacle by Rita Indiana, Swimming Home by Deborah Levy and The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway,

Thank you so much for the opportunity to review this book.

I read this on a whim, so I was surprised to discover it’s a rewrite of one of my favourite books, Rebecca. But where Rebecca is about a landed gentry and set in a seaside mansion in Cornwall, Utopia is about female artists trying to get ahead in the 1970s California desert.

The first half of this book was quite good. It’s written in a very North American style, you know, where people’s hair is always smelling of sweat and violets, but I enjoyed the triumvirate of characters: working class Paz, a struggling artist living in the shadow of her husband’s dead wife; beautiful but emotionally opaque Billy, successful because he’s a man; and Romy, who died under mysterious circumstances. The desert setting was appropriately different, its harsh environment adding a sense of danger to the narrative.

However, this didn’t ultimately work for me for two main reasons. First of all, as a rewrite I would argue it’s too faithful to the source text. I’ve read Rebecca several times, so absolutely nothing here surprised me. It’s noteworthy if you also consider that Rebecca is in many ways a rewrite itself, of the Bluebeard legend, and many readers have pointed out its uncanny plot similarities to Jane Eyre. But it’s the kind of rewrite that takes and idea or a structure and goes somewhere else with it, drawing new conclusions that ultimately reflect back on the source text and change our reading of it in a Borgesian way (we must see the implications of Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester a little differently, if we compare him to Maxim de Winter). However, Utopia, as far as I can tell, didn’t do anything that Rebecca hasn’t already done, or certainly nothing that Helen Oyeyemi didn’t do in Mr Fox, but both those books had the advantage of being much more oblique, of letting the reader stir around in the images and feelings and draw their own conclusions.

Which is my second complaint here. The second half of the book starts to spell everything out. Characters sit and talk, not just about what happened, but about how it made them feel, how their own past history influenced how they felt, how they might have felt if they’d had then the information they have now, ad nauseum. None of it sounded very 1970s to my ear, I’m afraid, it sounded straight out of a therapy session today and was unbelievably tedious. The final chapter has even more of this stuff. <spoiler>the ghost of Romy appears and starts spouting these same platitudes, like we hadn’t had enough of them from the living characters</spoiler>. Readers mileage may vary, but there’s nothing I hate more than being earnestly lectured at in a work of fiction.

So this is a frustrated two stars from me, BUT I will say that if the book had finished at about the 70% point, which I suspect is where an original draft did finish, with a fire in a building that is of course reminiscent of the fires at the end of Jane Eyre and Rebecca … if it had finished there I would have rated it much more highly.

Thanks to Netgalley and Scribe UK for an ARC.

Well, this was really great. I loved the riff on Rebecca, that it was acknowledged within the book quite obviously and then how it eventually went far beyond that initial idea.

I am drawn to novels about artists and what makes them tick, the strangeness of their lives, and their often free boundaries between friendship, sex, love and while definitely not for me, I even find their willingness to seek alternate states of being with booze and drugs to be interesting. Performance art is something I don't know much about, but I enjoyed learning a little more here.

This novel absolutely blazes with the fire of sun-soaked California deserts, prose that is so finely wrought there are entire pages that could be highlighted, and ultimately a lot of questions that the author doesn't entirely answer. What does is mean to be haunted by the shadow of your own potential? How is that changed when you're a woman trying to survive in a man's world? How does that shift again with motherhood? What is the cost of owning your own story?

This is definitely an author to watch.

My thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Some really interesting themes in this one, but I found the execution lacking -- it drags on for too long and doesn't focus on the most interesting aspects of the characters. Sadly not for me, despite some good atmosphere and interesting discussions of art.

Books about women and art are like catnip to me so this was always going to be a winner. Sopinka takes an informed and sophisticated view of the way art is both commodified in capitalist terms and how the systems and structures associated with it are acutely gendered from the way male artists are frequently allowed to be disembodied, to the way that gallery biographies include women's family and domestic backgrounds but rarely those of men.

Set in LA in the 1970s, this is a re-writing of 'Rebecca', referenced in the text, as Paz is obsessed with her husband's first wife, the artist Romy. Paz isn't nearly as interesting as Romy which, I'm assuming, is deliberately echoing the unnamed second wife of Du Maurier's classic but, luckily, she has interesting artistic friends and access to Romy's diaries, fascinating documents that are almost an artistic manifesto in their own right.

This isn't in any sense a mystery, though there is the question of what happened to Romy. Set at the time when female artists are reading Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto, there are questions about the constraints under which creative women are tethered - and Sopinka comes up with a surprising epilogue to tackle the issue of gendered (in)visibility that is threaded through the text.

A quick read but an engaging an intelligent one.

This was an enjoyable read that was well written and had an engaging storyline and well developed characters, however this is a three star read for me as I expected a big mystery to be the forefront of the novel but it wasn't so I was disappointed.

What if Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca had been set in the 1970s Californian artist community? It might be a little like this unusual novel, which focuses on feminism and creativity with an element of mystery. It follows Paz, a young artist who has replaced Romy, the wife of another artist, Billy. The first wife died from falling from a building at a party and it’s not clear who is responsible or even if Romy is somehow still alive and the fall was performance art. Paz is stepmother to the baby and she’s never quite sure of Billy. The story is about her trying to cope with her choices and carving out a separate identity from Romy.

I liked how the novel is a tribute to the women performance artists and their fight to be regarded as individuals and not as a collective, also their anger at not gaining the same respect as the men. It was an evocative story of desert, drugs and desire, shimmering with heat haze and dripping with sweat. However, there wasn’t as much mystery as the blurb suggested and the plot became more vague after the halfway point. I didn’t like the ending. It was clever but confusing and dull, which negatively influenced my opinion of the whole story.

In summary, a novel out of the ordinary which will particularly appeal to readers with an interest in performance art.

[Review will be on my blog, 7th August]

I really enjoyed the actual journey of reading this one, I read it fast! Utopia follows female performance artists in the desert in seventies America, and there’s a bit of a mystery element to it, although the main storyline centres more around heartsearching and following one’s passion, and the feminist movement at the time. Paz is our lead character, and she is a young woman who has become the second wife of a man whose first wife died in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind a young baby. Paz is, like the first wife, Romy, a performance artist, but both struggle to make art at all in such a male-dominated world. Now Paz’s time is taken up in looking after the baby, who is for most of the novel inexplicably called Flea, and wondering exactly what happened to Romy, whom she idolised. Most people blame Paz for taking Romy’s place, especially so soon after Romy’s death, and part of the early novel explores her struggling to work out how to carry on with her art and where she fits in in this new world that seems more Romy’s than hers. I have to say, there were times I didn’t feel I connected with the characters and their art, and the last 10% of the novel took a strange turn I wasn’t expecting and am not sure I enjoyed; but generally speaking I think this was an interesting novel. I think the elements around exploring a passion and creative talent were interesting, and the novel also explores themes of gender identity very well.

My thanks to #NetGalley and Scribe UK for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Have you ever been so fever ridden that you see stars and feel super disoriented? Well here is that experience in a book!
This book was super trippy, exploring themes of gender, sexuality, feminism and motherhood. I enjoyed reading this book (although it did drag at points, However I'm just attributing that to the fact that it is an e arc and not a print book).
This book takes you on a wild and confusing ride of mystery and revelations that all lead to what I thought was an ending that just felt like a disconnect in the story.
Although I truly did enjoy most of this book, I was a bit confused and bored at parts so 3 stars.
I am looking forward to rereading the physical copy and updating my review!