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.

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.