ANITA DE MONTE LAUGHS LAST

by Xochitl Gonzalez

I dont always love every pick in the Reece Witherspoon book club. I often find that the stories are exciting, but the actual execution lacks skill, or the authors choose the easy way out with a topic that could have been so much more. Anita de Monte Laughs Last surpassed all expectations and Gonzalez has written a truly skillful, intelligent and emotionally fascinating book.

The novel tells the stories of two women: Anita de Monte, a Cuban-American artist in the mid-1980s, and Raquel, a first-generation Ivy League student in the late 1990s who is studying Anita’s more famous sculptor husband for her art history thesis. Raquel loves art but struggles to find a place for herself on the mostly white, mostly wealthy campus. During a summer internship, a mentor mentions Anita de Monte and her suspicious death, and turns Raquel’s whole life upside down.

Anita’s perhaps familiar story conjures a female artist whose early promise is consumed and overshadowed by the larger-than-life presence of her husband’s. Because Anita narrates, we know she is anything but meek and her fight for recognition takes her past what anyone might consider possible.

Gonzalez has written a gripping story in an imaginative style that borders on magical realism. I loved this book and I hope you will too. (Lily)