Publisher's Weekly Review
Stevens's striking, unique debut explores the increasing alienation a young woman feels as eerie phenomena creep into her life. In Manhattan, just weeks after 9/11, Percy, a freelance copy-writer, discovers that she's pregnant. She feels unable to tell her new husband, Misha, who suddenly feels like a stranger to her. To her horror, she repeatedly tries to cut off Misha's breathing while he sleeps by squeezing his nostrils shut, then stops herself. Meanwhile, her apartment building is filled with complications--a neighbor and self-help author she works for keeps inviting her to poetry readings; the cartoonist next door has vanished without a trace. Percy's strange feelings come to a head when a package arrives containing a book of photographs from a gallery exhibition downtown. The photos are all of a nude woman on a bed, with digital modifications removing aspects of the image. Percy realizes that the exhibition is of work by her former fiancé--and the photos are of her, 10 years earlier. But when she tries to get them taken down at the gallery, no one believes the images are of her, and the line between reality and fantasy threatens to overwhelm her. The 9/11 aspect is unnecessary, but the plot is often fascinating and the reader will race to the end to figure out what, exactly, will happen to Percy. Stevens is a talented writer, and her debut is a propulsive experience. (Feb.)
Kirkus Review
A young woman wanders the nighttime streets of post-9/11 New York in search of answers to the mysterious disappearance of herself.One night, Persephone Q, or Percy for short, wakes up to find she no longer recognizes her husband. The man beside her is definitely Mishaher new husband, whom she'd married in the heady rush just after the Sept. 11 attacks, despite having known him for only four monthsbut it seems to Percy as if he has aged a whole decade overnight, leaving her behind. What's worse, her response to Misha's sudden unfamiliarity is "a small and violent impulse" to pinch his airways shut. Bewildered by her own behavior and pregnant with a baby she cannot seem to tell her husband about, Percy launches herself into the equally bewildered streets of a city in which posters for those still missing from the World Trade Center attacks "cropped up in bursts, like desperate plants, clambering over telephone poles, the entrances to trains, fences." In the midst of Percy's increasingly insomniac wanderings comes a mysterious package advertising the gallery opening for an exhibition of Percy's ex-fiance's photographs. The exhibition, entitled The Exhibition of Persephone Q, opened the day after the attacks and features image after image of a nude woman asleep in a red room in which, as the photographs progress, familiar domestic objects are replaced by creeping moss or tangled tree limbs and the skyline of the city outside is altered or erased. It is clear to Percy that the unnamed woman in the photographs is herself and the red bedroom is the one she used to live in when she and her ex-fiance were still engaged, yet no oneperhaps not even shecan see the resemblance. What follows in Stevens' dreamlike first novel is a delicate and drifting exploration of Percy's relationships with friends, lovers, neighbors, and the many not-quite strangers who form the fabric of city life. As Percy wanders, New York itself is reflected through the prism of her many identities"The woman [she] was with Misha, a wife who loved her husband and yet tried to kill him all the samethe woman in the pictures, peaceful and asleep, albeit a little bit dead; also a mother; a daughter; a somnambulist who could not sleep"in luminous prose that captures the essence of a place in the middle of its most defining transformation.A stellar debut. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT In this puzzling debut novel, Percy is a woman trapped by her own passivity, a woman whose identity has been defined primarily by her relationship to men. She's married to Misha, but the arrival of an exhibition catalog of photographs by her former fiancé disrupts her insular world. All of the photographs in the collection are of a nude woman, Persephone Q, and Percy suspects that she is that woman. Aimless, directionless, and unsure, Percy wanders Manhattan fretting about her marriage, her unexpected pregnancy, and what she should do about the photographs. Can she prove she is Persephone Q? Should she tell Misha she is pregnant? Percy's internal monolog travels with her, but despite her many references to Web 1.0, such as Earthlink, AOL, Napster, and, inexplicably, Boolean logic, it doesn't feel like the early 2000s it's said to be. VERDICT Percy's perspective is so limited and her world so small that readers who don't identify with her may lose patience. This book's primary audience will be those interested in the ruminations of an insecure young woman trying to find her way in the world.--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD
