Review by Booklist Review
Landau's engrossing third outing, after her WII--era Those Who Are Saved (2021), is a sharply observed look at modern motherhood and marriage. Professor Ava Zaretsky travels with her preteen daughter Margot and son Sam to Bulgaria for the summer, where her husband, Kasper, is producing an action movie. Once there, Ava finds her resentment towards Kasper growing as the burdens of childcare and home maintenance fall squarely on her shoulders, leaving her with little time to work on her book about ancient Greek womanhood. When Ava runs into her college professor Lydia Nikitas in a café in Sofia, Nikitas invites her to the apartment she shares with a fellow professor and then to take part in the reenactment of an ancient Greek ritual. Limning such heady subjects as the suppression of the divine feminine, women's rage over being saddled with the majority of domestic labor and childcare no matter how many other responsibilities and passions they have, and the dangers and delights of the various seasons of a woman's life, Landau's latest will resonate powerfully with readers.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
An art history professor gets initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries in Landau's uneven tale of Greek antiquity and modern-day female rage (following Those Who Are Saved). At 45, Ava Zaretsky is drowning in household chores and has too little time for the book she's writing about a woman's life in 415 BCE Athens. Kasper, her film producer husband, is in Bulgaria filming an action movie, and Ava visits him in Sofia for the summer with their two young children. There, Ava reconnects with Lydia Nikitas, her former mentor at Columbia University. Decades ago, Professor Nikitas destroyed Ava's chance to join Yale's art history graduate program after she chose to write her thesis on a different topic from the one Nikitas advised. Their bond is shaky, to say the least, but Ava confides nonetheless in Nikitas about her struggles, and Nikitas invites her to join a ritual for worshipping Demeter and Persephone in Greece. Landau lays bare the challenges facing a working mother, but the novel's climax, which is teased in a prologue where a group of angry blood-spattered women form a circle around a man and pelt him with stones, isn't quite coherent. Novels like Donna Tartt's The Secret History have tackled similar material to greater effect. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Naggar Literary. (May)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
What is the cure for misogyny? Weaving together contemporary and ancient storylines, Landau addresses a question often asked by women, hardly ever by men: Where did all our power go? Ava Zaretsky, an art historian and mother of two, juggles her life and ambitions along with her primary responsibility for the domestic and parental chores of her marriage. Her husband Kasper's career as a movie producer requires him to work long hours and travel. Family obligations don't seem to get in the way of work for him (or even occupy the same amount of brain space they do for Ava). When Kasper relocates from California to Bulgaria for a six-month shoot, Ava examines all aspects of their relationship with a critical eye but travels there for a summertime visit with her kids in an effort to keep the family intact. An encounter in Sofia with a feminist college professor who'd been influential in Ava's education and thought process results in Ava's growing involvement with a group of women seeking to reclaim long-lost power and status through the re-creation of ancient goddess rites and practices. Interspersed throughout Ava's story are episodes from the life of a Greek mother and her teenage daughter (who was on the cusp of marriage) that have parallels to the contemporary narrative. (Ava's own daughter is edging toward adolescence, and Ava's concerns about preparing her for the fraught life of a woman weigh heavily on her.) Landau launches the novel with a prologue that foreshadows the extent of the rage carried by the women participating in the rituals, a culmination of centuries of repression and disempowerment. Ava's tightrope walk between competing obligations is vividly illustrated in a thoughtful novel utilizing the past to illuminate present-day ills. An enraging past is the prologue to a provocative present-day narrative. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
