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A Novel
by Xochitl Gonzalez
Book Reviewed by:New York Times bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez delivers a mesmerizing novel about a first-generation Ivy League student who uncovers the genius work of a female artist decades after her suspicious death
1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn't. By 1998 Anita's name has been all but forgotten—certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved out for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret.
But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita's story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist.
Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love, and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.
In Xochitl Gonzalez's second novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, readers are in for another thrilling ride. Again, the author delivers a satisfying, propulsive story as she relates the sometimes-parallel experiences faced by two Latina women who, a decade apart, must each navigate elitist, alien environments. As her characters confront the mores and expectations of the New York art world and Ivy League academia, Gonzalez points a high beam into the shadows to locate the traps of race, gender and class that undercut her main characters at every turn. In so doing, she once again deftly incorporates into her fiction the piercing social critique that readers have come to admire...continued
Full Review
(766 words)
(Reviewed by Danielle McClellan).
The title character in Xochitl Gonzalez's Anita de Monte Laughs Last is closely based on the artist Ana Mendieta. Although Mendieta's shocking death at the age of thirty-five has overshadowed her artistic legacy in the public imagination, Mendieta was a rising star at the time of her death, and her creative work continues to hold relevance today.
Born in Cuba in 1940, Ana Mendieta was the second of Ignacio and Raquel Mendieta's three children. In 1952, Ana, age 12, and her sister Raquelin, 14, were sent to America as part of a program known as the Peter Pan Project. In the years immediately following the Cuban Revolution, Cuban children were sent alone to America by parents panicked over erroneous reports that the new Castro ...
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