Raquel Toro is a first-generation university student in her third year at an Ivy League school studying art history. She’s never heard of Anita de Monte but the two share several commonalities though they’re a generation apart in Xochitl Gonzalez’s novel Anita de Monte Laughs Last.
Anita was an up and coming artist in the mid-1980s before she’s found dead. Her husband, Jack, is a well-known, successful sculptor who, although professes his undying love, manipulates his wife to suit his moods/needs.
Jump ahead to the late 1990s, Raquel is certain she wants to do her senior thesis on Jack, with neither awareness of his deceased wife, nor knowledge of how she died. Although Raquel doesn’t realize it, readers will quickly see similar behaviors between Jack and Nick, the graduating art student from a wealthy family, with whom she becomes romantically involved.
There is passion in both relationships, but there are also strings attached. As she researches Jack’s work, Raquel identifies a period in which he produced little, if any, art. This is roughly the same time of Anita’s death, which is noted as either a fall from or push out of a high-story New York City window in the novel’s early pages. A subsequent trial following her death is also new to Raquel.
The engaging storyline is driven by chapters narrated by Anita, Raquel and occasionally Jack. Those revealing Anita’s side of the story require accepting the perspective from someone who’s dead, but very much alive in the spirit world.
Anita De Monte Laughs Last
Three and three-quarter bookmarks
Flatiron Books, 2024
341 pages
The Blue Page Special 