Must Read Well by Ellen Pall
Requirements: .ePUB readers, Retail
Overview: MUST READ WELL immerses the reader in an escalating game of cat-and-mouse between two women: a millennial scholar driven to deceit to reach her goals and a frail octogenarian no less capable of deception.
Narrated by Liz Miller, a Ph.D. candidate up to her ears in debt and desperate to finish her dissertation, the novel begins when Liz’s boyfriend abruptly ditches her, rendering her homeless and reduced to couch-surfing at best friend Petra’s tiny Manhattan apartment. Trying to find an affordable living space, she stumbles across a Craigslist posting that will change her life: a room with a view in a prewar Greenwich Village apartment. The rent is a pittance, but in exchange, the tenant must be willing to read aloud daily to the apartment’s vision-impaired landlady.
Spotting several clues in the posting, Liz immediately realizes that the sight-impaired landlady is none other than Anne Taussig Weil, author of the 1965 international blockbuster The Vengeance of Catherine Clark—and the very woman whose refusal to cooperate has held up Liz’s dissertation on the feminist works of mid-century women novelists for the last four years. Access to Weil is the key to completing her doctorate at Columbia and finally getting her academic career on track. And here, suddenly, it is.
Driven by need, determination to make something of herself, and a deep conviction that her dissertation will prove the significance of Weil’s to the feminist literary canon, Liz sets scruples aside and presents herself as a quiet young woman still finding her way in life and in need of an affordable place to live. Days after passing a reading audition, she moves into her quarry’s apartment.
Once settled in, Liz learns that Weil’s search for a reader stems from a desire to revisit a key episode in her life many years ago. The episode, recorded in the scrawled journals Weil kept since she was a girl, turns out to be the story of her passionate, disastrous, secret love affair with a celebrated pianist—the affair, in fact, which gave rise to the plot of Vengeance. As Liz reads aloud, we too learn Weil’s story. Between readings, and amid the growing intimacy between the two women, Liz wrestles with her conscience, torn between her conviction that her deception will establish Weil’s rightful place in 20th century literature and her deepening unease about her own duplicity. And then, the stakes in the game of cat-and-mouse begin to rise . . .
Genre: Fiction > Mystery/Thriller
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