• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2017 April #1
  Lepucki's first novel, California (2014), a postapocalyptic adventure, landed on best-seller lists. Her second is an acidly inquisitive domestic drama set in the Hollywood Hills and anchored to depthless questions of identity, family, and art. Lady has ousted her producer-husband and brought in aspiring artist S. as a nanny for her peppy toddler son, Devin. Seth, her teenage son from her brief, disastrous first marriage, cannot speak, a mysterious affliction about which Lady is supposed to be writing a memoir. S. has embarked on a covert, psychologically risky work of performance art. The novel's title refers to a starkly revealing photograph of Lady taken by her husband's twin sister, an artist S. reveres. Psychically bruised by their twisted relationships with their mothers, Lady and S. forge a precarious alliance riddled with secrets and lies, and they are flagrant in their failures to care for others or themselves. The facades they erect are diabolically confounding, as is Seth's silence. Lepucki's arch and provocative tale of elaborate and privileged dysfunction poses sharp questions about inheritance, self-expression, and love. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews.

EDAN LEPUCKI is the New York Times bestselling author of the novel California as well as the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me. A contributing editor and staff writer at the Millions, she has also published fiction and nonfiction in McSweeney's, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Cut, and elsewhere. She is the founder of Writing Workshops Los Angeles.