Crown Publishing, May 9, 2017.
Five Stars
I seem to be in the minority here because I absolutely
loved this book – everything about it, from the complicated female main
characters to the twisty and surprising plot, checks boxes off my reading wish list.
Woman No. 17 is a darkly humorous
noir novel about women and the roles they take on – mother, wife, daughter,
lover – and the boundaries they break to redefine those roles. It also explores
the importance of female friendship, and how well we can ever know the people
that share our deepest secrets.
Lady Daniels lives in the wealthy Hollywood Hills,
overlooking Los Angeles. Newly separated from her husband Karl, Lady decides to
hire a nanny to care for her toddler son while she works on her memoir. Far from
being as privileged and entitled as she sounds, Lady grew up poor and feels
like an imposter in the hills. She raised her older – now eighteen-year-old –
son, Seth, on her own and struggled to get by until she met and fell in love
with Karl. Lady struggled financially, but also emotionally, as she coped with
raising a nonverbal son who has been diagnosed with selective mutism – he can
hear and is capable of speaking, but communicates instead through sign language
or his iPad. Lady’s memoir is about life with a nonverbal child, but her
secrets are holding her back from even beginning the book.
Esther is a college student in her 20s, struggling to
find her place in the world. She applies for the nanny job on a whim, and Lady
hires her without even bothering to check her references – fortunately for
Esther, who is in the process of reinventing herself as “S”, and turning her whole
life into an art project in which she channels her erratic, alcoholic mother.
Instead of repelling people, as she expected, the entire Daniels family is
drawn into S’s exciting, charismatic personality. She becomes a confidante for
both Lady and Seth, creating dangerous undercurrents of intimacy and shocking
conflict.
The first person point of view alternates between
Lady and S, including flashbacks into their dark pasts. Both women had
horrible, neglectful mothers which formed them into the women they are now,
often in unexpected ways. This novel explores so many powerful issues, such as
alcoholism, anxiety, depression, abuse and low self-esteem, to name a few –
these are universal themes, but here they are viewed with a decidedly female
slant. This is far from chick-lit, and it was exciting and reaffirming to read
about strong women with all their faults – Lady and S made incredibly bad
decisions, but they are good, honest, complex and real.
The title of the novel refers to a series of
photographs taken of various women, seemingly caught unaware in their natural
environment of cluttered kitchens and unmade beds. The photographer is Lady’s
sister-in-law, and it is never clear if it was her intention to objectify these
women or to empower them. I think the novel, at least, is about women using
their own agency to shift the boundaries of womanhood – to go from being an art
object to being able to accept themselves, without pretending to be someone
else. In the end, all the secrets come out, and it is just as dark and twisty
as you expect it to be – but at the same time, I laughed out loud many times, in
both recognition and amazement at Lepucki’s uncanny ability to capture these
vicious, sensitive, complex characters.
I received this book from Crown Publishing and
NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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