Despite the massive library of books in my mental queue that I want to read, I was swayed by a random woman I encountered on a random scroll through TikTok who gushed so much about this book that I put it at the front of my line. Which is kind of out of character for me and my usual meticulous planning, but it certainly mirrors the abrupt barrages of chaos in the book’s premise.
I hate to give away plot points, but the book cover itself tells you that it’s a story about a young woman who ages out of the world of child beauty pageants and eventually discovers that she and many of her friends/frenemies/competitors on the pageant circuit have all along been sleeper-cell government agents who’ve been programmed to do covert (and never specified) missions that are immediately erased from their memories.
There’s obviously a lot more detail—and plenty of short-lived side plots—to flesh out an entire novel, but the protagonist’s journey of discovery from one world to the other is the only true throughline. And its absurdist connection between the two worlds never quite lands with me.
I worried as I got deeper into the story that it might have feminist-coded undertones that I just wasn’t catching, but aside from the references to the beauty pageants—which are delightfully droll and retrospectively appalling to the protagonist—her personal discoveries and the larger narrative themes are rather universal and arguably gender-neutral.
There are many, many references to circles and spheres and spirals that I worried were elements of symbolism I also wasn’t catching, but the narrator discusses them mostly in reference to the circuitous, slightly-off-linear way she tells her story.
The bulk of the story takes place in an unspecified area of the Midwest that is relatively close to Interstate 80 and Chicago, and at one point it involves a Hy-Vee grocery bag, so I’m guessing it’s in Iowa.
And during college the narrator lives in a dorm called Mayflower that’s pretty far from the campus and that looks over a river and beyond it the school’s fine-arts buildings, all of which sounds a hell of a lot like the University of Iowa. But her Mayflower has a tall bell tower—and it quickly becomes clear that her Mayflower is a metaphoric ship that takes her life to a whole new world. Which is what college obviously does, but for her it starts her journey into the aforementioned plot discombobulations.
On the plus side, Wuehle knows a lot of interesting things about a lot of interesting things, so the book takes you on mini educational journeys through the worlds of cellular preservation, photography and the development of film in darkrooms, makeup (of course), scientific taxonomy, training octopi, academic accreditation, catechismisc theory, and even Norwegian folklore.
And she’s a published poet, which certainly shows in the way she crafts sentences and summons allusions and shapes narrative imagery.
I also seem to be on an unintentional paranormal kick in my recent choices of literature. It’s clearly no secret that the child-beauty-pageant/covert-government-sleeper-agent narrative veers sharply outside the world of realism in the novel, which is all lighthearted fun. But then it VEERS. I powered through the last chapter just to say I’d finished the book.
I’ve been posting reviews of the books I’ve been reading both to help hold myself accountable to my goal to read at least one book a month and to put content on social media and my writing blog that isn’t about the you-know-who shitshow. In my innate need to not come off as mean to my fellow (and clearly more successful) writers, I try to focus on positive things—which I hope I have here—but aside from the novel’s unconventional way of describing how lives and people aren’t always what they seem—even to the people living those lives—I have to say the book is largely perplexing, I’m glad I finished it and I won’t be revisiting it again.
Do with that what you will.
