Monarch A novel

Child beauty pageants collide with a CIA mind control program in this bonkers debut novel from poet Wuehle (Death Industrial Complex). Jessica Clink, a precocious beauty queen, bulldozes her competition in pageants until she's 13, when she falls for Veronica, her rival, in 1993. Her mother, a deposed Norwegian royal, busies herself hosting parties to tout an antiaging cryo chamber, while her professor father is absorbed in studying crimes of passion. They hire Christine, a young goth woman, as Jessica's babysitter. After Jessica's coach forces her to sabotage Veronica, Christine convinces her to quit the pageants. Jessica then falls into bouts of sleepwalking and wakes up with mysterious bruises and gaps in her memory. In 1999, as a college student working at a photography store, Jessica develops a series of lurid crime-scene photos that trigger a flood of memories, prompting her mother to reveal that Jessica was a sleeper agent in Monarch, an offshoot of MKUltra. Now Jessica is out to find vengeance--and the truth about Veronica. Wuehle's fever dream impressively connects a series of such true crime cases as Lorena Bobbitt's and the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson with Jessica's coming of age and her theorizing as to the purpose of her teenage life. Readers sturdy enough to peer into this glittering, multifaceted novel will find weaponized beauty reflected back. Agent: Kiele Raymond, Thompson Literary. (Mar.)

A former child beauty queen--turned--depressive teen grapples with her identity after learning she can't trust her own memory. The cover would suggest this debut novel is an espionage thriller: At 30, Jessica Clink "discovers she's been a sleeper agent in a deep state government program." And while this book is an exercise in finding answers, it isn't a fast-paced, hemisphere-crossing quest story. Instead, Jessica's introspective narrative is meant to craft a cohesive story for herself from a lifetime of shredded memories--it's therapy and reinvention and confession all at the same time. Set against a 1990s backdrop--Bill Clinton, tanning beds, JonBenét Ramsey--Jessica's first-person search for her forgotten years is a curious monologue combining teenage humor with the sterility of a psychological evaluation. Jessica begins with the easy part--stating what truths can be established: "To tell this story, the narrator became a child beauty queen." It's also disclosed that Jessica's mother, Grethe, is Norwegian and a former beauty queen herself. Jessica's post-punk--loving babysitter, Christine, is Grethe's distant relation and one of the few people allowed in the house by Jessica's father, Dr. Clink, who is "the founder and chair of the Boredom Studies department at the Midwestern University [Jessica] dropped out of." As Jessica provides a basic outline of her life, revealing the "subtle panic [that] undergirded the atmosphere" of her home, she drops hints at the betrayals and violence to come. Eventually, she begins to deliver revelations--like having been "trained by operatives of a shadow government" and having "several different 'personas' that [she] could 'transition' into"--with zero dramatic effect. These are mere details amid the larger violence inflicted upon her--the loss of self. Patient readers will enjoy some thrills in reaching the end of Jessica's narrative spiral, which aggressively picks up pace in the end. But these moments feel almost out of place; they are benign vehicles pushing Jessica toward a sense of resolution. Ultimately, this story is a product of memory that is "hers. And hers alone." A deeply introspective novel with a notable metaphor for reinvention after trauma in the form of a weaponized pageant girl. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.