3 minute read
THE VILLA by Rachel Hawkins
the villa
Hollerith machines, primitive computers first deployed in the 1890 U.S. census and used by the Third Reich to track information about its Jewish residents and keep the concentration camps running in good order. While she’s hunkering down to the first of many rewrites demanded by Broadway director Irving Bass, who’s interested in the material despite its historical sprawl, more disturbing developments await her extended family. Kate’s ex Noah Dunn, a senior cybercrimes prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C., expresses renewed interest in Christian Gamble’s relationship with Sandra Levy, a “trusted advisor” who’s doing time for corporate espionage. And the Chinese government, which paid Levy and her highly placed accomplice for Buck Technologies secrets they didn’t deliver, plucks Patrick Battle, an up-and-coming Buck employee Kate used to babysit, from a corporate survival exercise in Colombia and uses him as a hostage to extort the particulars of Code 6, an undetectable data scraping tool, from Christian Gamble and Jeremy Peel, the chairman of the board who’s trying to push him out and take his place. None of these 12-cylinder adventures do justice to the paranoid premise.
High-stakes espionage, family drama, double crosses, noble gestures: For better or worse, it’s all here.
THE VILLA
Hawkins, Rachel St. Martin’s (288 pp.) $28.99 | Jan. 3, 2023 978-1-2502-8001-5
Past and present collide when two old friends spend a summer writing at an infamous villa in Italy. After a tough year, Emily Sheridan needs a change. Enter Chess Chandler, her best friend since childhood, the golden girl who has become effortlessly famous for her selfhelp books and her glamorous Instagram posts and who has rented an Italian villa for the summer—a villa famous not only as a luxury retreat, but as the scene of a 1970s murder. Hawkins then turns the narrative over to the people who inhabited the villa that tragic summer—particularly a young woman writer who finds the inspiration to write a seminal work of horror; her hapless, brilliant husband; and the cruel, famous young aristocrat who drew them all there. It takes barely a page for the allusions to become apparent: This is a reimagining of the famous summer of 1814, when Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron held a ghost story contest from which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was born. The novel continues to cut from the summer of 1974 to the present, as Emily begins to recapture her own power and imagination as a writer—even as she discovers that Chess may not be the friend she appears to be. Though the introduction of the major players of 1974 (Mari Godwick, Pierce Sheldon, Noel Gordon, etc.) feels rather heavy-handed, the characters quickly take on a fascinating life and energy that elevates them from being mere copies of the historic Romantics. And while the operatically tragic characters of the 1970s are ultimately more intriguing than Chess and Emily and their (mostly) petty dramas, Hawkins casts a sharp eye throughout to the way we construct stories about female artists—and the moral ambiguity inherent in creation and fame. The effect lingers like a shadow, or a creature, that endures past the final words.
Hawkins manages to achieve the seemingly impossible: A
Frankenstein-inspired novel that feels both fresh and unique.
THE REVIVALISTS
Hood, Christopher M. Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $27.99 | Oct. 4, 2022 978-0-06-322-139-0
A fast-paced addition to the rapidly growing genre of the post-apocalyptic road novel.
Bill and Penelope are among the fortunate few, in theory. Two-thirds of
