Monarch

A Lambda Literary Best Book of the Month A CrimeReads Best Book of the Month A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of the Year Candice Wuehle's irresistibly weird debut novel MONARCH is the kind of book that you want to start reading again immediately after turning the last page-not just to trace the conspiracy at its heart, but to appreciate how its kaleidoscope of beauty pageants, Y2K anxieties, famous dead girls, and deep state machinations synthesizes into an exploration of what makes up a self . . . Poetic, haunting. -Kristen Martin, NPR If the vacant, robotic gaze of the beauty queen has ever seemed sinister to you, Ms. Wuehle provides a possible reason . . . Wuehle pursues her gonzo premise with satirical gusto, mixing together some curious brew of Robert Ludlum and Don DeLillo . . . [A] lively debut. -Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal Intoxicating and strange . . . A novel that's as addicting as it is heartbreaking. -Sophia June, NYLON, One of the Must-Read Books of the Month Candice Wuehle had me at 'Jon Benet Ramsey.' The poet's new novel follows a former child pageant star as she discovers ties to her previous glory and a deep state government program. Add an occult wellness guru to the mix, a heaping of mommy issues, and a queer romance for taste and this might just be my ideal book. -Kerensa Cadenas, Thrillist Wuehle is catching a wave of nineties nostalgia and retrospective media criticism, in large part ushered in by the immensely popular podcast, 'You're Wrong About' . . . As much as MONARCH is a conspiracy-theory-thriller, inviting the possibility that an amorphous, terrible something in one's environment might be located and made legible, it is also a story about piecing together the fuzzy impressions of childhood, watching as they form into a coherent whole the way a photo develops in a darkroom. Wuehle is masterful . . . An artisan; one senses while reading her that she has absolute control over the page-could conjure any emotion or image with startling concision, no matter how surreal or uncanny. -Lily Houston Smith, Chicago Review of Books A sinisterly fun novel . . . For fans of Stranger Things mixed with Little Miss Sunshine. It doesn't sound like it works, but it sure as hell does. -Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful What does it mean when you're not who you thought you were? Alternately: the categories of 'beauty queen' and 'sleeper agent' have, historically speaking, not had much overlap. Candace Wuehle's forthcoming Monarch poses the question: what if someone could lay claim to both of those job descriptions? Throw in a touch of the occult and a bit of punk rock and you have an intriguing combination. -Tobias Carroll, Tor.com Fantastically strange . . . Monarch feels a bit like the folks behind You're Wrong About teamed up with the writers of Killing Eve, and they all did some psychedelics and wrote a script together. -Molly Odintz, CrimeReads, A Most Anticipated Book A deeply introspective novel with a notable metaphor for reinvention after trauma in the form of a weaponized pageant girl. -Kirkus Reviews Readers sturdy enough to peer into this glittering, multifaceted novel will find weaponized beauty reflected back. -Publishers Weekly A wise, unsettling, and multifaceted masterpiece, MONARCH succeeds on all levels-as a portrait of an endearingly dysfunctional family, as a shadow history of Y2K and the hidden power structure underlying and undermining contemporary life, and as a profound exploration of the extremely dicey prospect of being a self in a body in the world. Unless you're hiding in an underground city or frozen in a kryokammer in the desert, you'll want to run out and get this one right away! -David Leo Rice, author of The Dodge City Trilogy, Angel House, and Drifter: Stories In this riddled pageantric, insomniac, photographic, and university-infused world of eating disorders, triple suicides, astral projections, enigmatic bruises, and uncontrollable impulses, Candice Wuehle's poetic and narrative gaze on everything she Midas-touches is eyelined, eyeshadowed, polished, Norwegian lip-penciled, and loose powdered with her devilishly inventive, singularly imaginative beauty and a devastating wry sense of humor. Her brilliance in MONARCH will lacquer, enamel, and wax you and turn your mind inside out like a monarch butterfly macerated in emulsion. -Vi Khi Nao, author of The Vegas Dilemma and Swimming with Dead Stars Don DeLillo can only dream of being Candice Wuehle, who's wrenched the maximalist postmodern novel from the hands of old white men and given it an enticingly feminist spin. MONARCH is a smart, weird, funny gut punch, the kind of book that will blister your brain in the best possible way. -Rafael Frumkin, author of The Comedown This book is really quite sinister, and I mean that in the Latin sense-MONARCH takes the left-hand path through a chilling (and, if you're honest with yourself, quite real) landscape as Jessica, a decommissioned MKUltra-esque beauty queen, traces back to her origins as such. Along the way, she has to tell the true from the false, which can be difficult when you have a closet full of alters and a lot of gruesome off-label memories. Underneath it all is a question you can probably relate to even if you aren't the progeny of a cryogenically preserved mother and a father who lectures on Boredom Studies: How do we know which of our reactions belong to us? How can we tell apart the conditioned self from the one we actually live with, especially when we've been trauma-trained into not looking too closely at certain facts? What happens when our frozen selves start to thaw? If you've always been suspicious of the institutions of childhood, beauty, and sentimentality, this book is for you. If you crave a frosty narrative voice with the whip and torque of a bitchy gymnast, this book is for you. It will make you smarter. And it will also upset your schema for the world-but you'll be glad, I promise. -Sarah Elaine Smith, author of Marilou is Everywhere