Book Review: The Vixen Amber Holloway by Carol LaHines

A Remarkable Reading Experience!

Greetings!

As I continue to work through publication planning for my novel due out in October, I’m sharing something from my reading life—which is just as important to me as my writing life.

One reason I enjoy writing book reviews is the challenge inherent in understanding the reading experience I just had and then articulating it in a way that is true to my experience and understandable to other people. My review of The Vixen Amber Holloway is a case in point. (Review appears below.)

Until next time—

Take care,
Liz

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I found myself strangely affected by The Vixen Amber Holloway–not by the vixen in question but by the first-person narrator, Ophelia, who relates her story from a prison cell, ostensibly as an apologia to the parole board for her upcoming hearing. As the novel progressed, however, I had the sense that she was perseverating into the void, and I was the only person listening.

Ophelia is a former Dante professor who was blindsided by her husband’s betrayal of her with his coworker Amber Holloway. As the result of her mother’s abandonment and her father’s suicide when she was a child, Ophelia was already a damaged soul going into the marriage. Her husband’s betrayal sets her on an obsessive path to understand–and end–her husband’s relationship with Amber. Ophelia stalks them with the most extreme behavior imaginable, including killing Amber’s dog.

While the novel has been described as a dark comedy, I found the absurdity of Ophelia’s behavior more evocative of pathos than humor. Her elevated diction and arch tone as she narrates her story seem to be a defense mechanism to distance herself from what has happened to her, including her own deranged behavior. However, the elevated diction and arch tone did not distance her from me as a reader, which is usually the case when I read a dark comedy.

The novel is relatively short, coming in at just under 200 pages. Short chapters make for compelling narrative tension and a sense of inevitability as the narration plunges toward its climax. Yet the climax of the story was not at all what I expected–and it made me feel for Ophelia even more.

Ophelia’s final shouting into the void is sheer self-justification as she pleads with whomever might be listening to see her as a human being who has been wronged, a human being with feelings, a human being who has value.

The Vixen Amber Holloway is tour de force of character-driven literary fiction from a writer in full command of her craft. My experience reading it is going to stay with me for a very long time to come.