Review by New York Times Review
Prentiss's first novel is about art: making it, loving it and letting it go. And the book itself is a work of artistry. Prentiss plays with form: Scenes are described as human portraits (Central Park is Manhattan's spine; Midtown, the lungs). She's inventive: A critic sees people as colors (he is split-pea-soup green, his wife is pink wine). She pushes the plot in shocking directions, and she has done her research: Keith Haring, Jeff Koons and Jean-Michel Basquiat all make cameos. But what stands out is a straightforward and familiar story: A small-town girl arrives in New York City in want of a new life. She gets an apartment and a makeover, finds a job as a bartender and inevitably becomes discouraged. She is "a girl in a room full of other girls just like her, who have come here to tunnel down into their own dark parts and find the light." But the writing - authentic and frenetic - makes the material feel fresh. I've been there, done that, but I held my breath the whole way.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Prentiss' debut novel captures the eruption of creativity and commodification precipitated by New York City's 1970s crash into fiscal and criminal chaos. Painter Raul appears within this maelstrom after fleeing Buenos Aires before the onset of the Dirty War. He vamps his way into free studio space and, with the gruff mentorship of a veteran artist named Arlene, rapidly ascends toward the blazing beacon of fame. Art critic James makes a splash as he draws on the strange revelations of his synesthesia, which jumbles his senses and intensifies the force fields of the art he scrutinizes. Lucy is a lovely innocent from Idaho who stumbles her way into the molten heart of the art scene, at once foolish and brave. An agile, imaginative, knowledgeable, and seductive writer, Prentiss combines exquisite sensitivity with unabashed melodrama to create an operatic tale of ambition and delusion, success and loss, mystery and crassness. Though some characters are predictable, most, especially James and his wife, are fresh, funny, ardent, and magnetizing. Prentiss' insights into this brash art world are sharply particularized and shrewd, but she also tenderly illuminates universal sorrows, beautiful horrors, and lush moments of bliss. In all, a vital, sensuous, edgy, and suspenseful tale of longing, rage, fear, compulsion, and love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
First-time novelist Prentiss vividly conjures a colorful love triangle set in the gritty, art-soaked world of downtown New York in 1980. Raul Engales is a painter throwing himself into the scene as a means to escape his past in Argentina, where war has cast everything into shadow. James Bennett is an up-and-coming art critic with an overwhelming gift: synesthesia: "an image was manufactured into a bodily sensation... applesauce tasted like sadness and winter was the color blue." The fulcrum is Lucy Olliason, a naive beauty from Idaho, drawn to New York by a postcard of the skyline she found on the side of the road. Prentiss shines when showing us James's powers of perception. Impressive, too, is her ability to create an atmosphere that crackles with possibility as well as foreboding. She sprinkles verisimilitude throughout the SoHo scene-Laurie Anderson sings at a party at Raul's squat; Lucy spies Keith Haring tagging a subway station; news of "Jean-Michel" and his neologistic SAMO tags are everywhere and nowhere, a spectral presence imprinting on Raul's psyche. Structured over a year beset by tragedy, the story belongs to the two great men, artist and critic; Lucy's beauty is her most distinguishing characteristic. One yearns for more time spent on the women artists who are minor characters, James's magnanimous wife, Marge, and Lucy's sometime roommate. Nevertheless, this is a bold and auspicious debut. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
[DEBUT]In this first novel, a large cast of characters converge in New York on the cusp of a major societal shift. The darkness of the city in the 1970s will give way to big money and gentrification in the 1980s, but the fledgling artists of SoHo revel in the thrill of creating a new cutting edge. Raul is an artist who has fled from persecution in Argentina; James is an art critic whose synesthesia translates his sensory input into colors and images; Lucy is a naïf who has just moved from Idaho, boldly diving into the middle of the swirling eddy. Hovering around these three is a vast array of people and events, and SoHo, too, serves as a force, moving the plot forward at a dizzying pace. Tragedies come and go, changes within the city begin to take shape, and emotions fly like loose papers on the street. Verdict Capturing the zeitgeist of a pivotal time and place, this novel is brash and ambitious, with a dash of magical realism thrown in: think Andy Warhol's legendary parties when they were still underground. Prentiss has created a remarkable debut.-Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Prentiss' sweeping debut follows three intertwining lives through the swirling energy, burning excitement, and crushing disappointment of New York City's rapidly shifting art world at the dawn of the 1980s. It's Dec. 31, 1979, and James Bennett, a synesthetic rising star of art criticism, and his also-brilliant pregnant wife are toasting the new decade at the kind of swanky art-scene party they prefer to avoid. Also at the party: painter Raul Engales, a charismatic Argentinian expatriate who's done his best to erase his past life and is now poised, though he doesn't know it yet, to become the darling of the art world. And: in a bar downtown later that night, Raul catches the (gorgeous) eye of 21-year-old Lucy Marie Olliason, recently transplanted from Ketchum, Idaho, in love with the city, and ready to fall in love with the artists in it. Their stories crash into each other like dominoesthe critic, the artist, and the musetheir separate futures and personal tragedies inextricably linked. The particulars of their connections, romantic and artistic, are too big and too poetic to be entirely plausible, but then, this is not a slice-of-life novel: this is a portrait of an era, an intoxicating Manhattan fairy tale. Prentiss' charactersrich, nuanced, satisfyingly complicatedare informed not only by their emotional lives, but also by their intellectual and artistic ones; their relationships to art are as lively and essential as their relationships to each other. But while the novel is elegantly infused with an ambient sense of impending lossthis is New York on the cusp of drastic gentrificationit miraculously manages to dodge the trap of easy nostalgia, thanks in large part to Prentiss' wry humor. As affecting as it is absorbing. A thrilling debut. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
