When a local shopkeeper suggests that the main character in the bestselling novel of Mrs. March’s husband may be based on Mrs. March herself, a series of doubts creep into Mrs. March's mind—which fester into severe paranoia. Elisabeth Rodgers’s calm narration is the perfect match for this audiobook. Her well-honed timing helps build the tension as Mrs. March loses touch with reality and becomes increasingly unreliable, leaving the listener wondering where the truth lies. Rodgers’s characterization of Mrs. March creates an unreliable protagonist who is struggling internally yet is unable to ask for help. Although the story is set in an unspecified time, it feels like the 1950s, when awareness of mental health issues was still in its infancy. K.J.P. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Mrs. March
Narrated by Elisabeth Rodgers
Virginia FeitoUnabridged — 8 hours, 27 minutes
Mrs. March
Narrated by Elisabeth Rodgers
Virginia FeitoUnabridged — 8 hours, 27 minutes
Audiobook (Digital)
Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
Already Subscribed?
Sign in to Your BN.com Account
Related collections and offers
FREE
with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription
Overview
There are many sly touches that keep us on guard throughout this intriguing novel. Who IS Mrs. March? What IS she seeing? At times, we feel like we’re walking on the set of a David Lynch movie written by Patricia Highsmith. At any moment, we expect to see Alfred Hitchcock peek around the corner. And if the light catches our eye at just the right time, who can say what we saw run across the room? Feito builds a strange world around her protagonist, Mrs. March. Though, over time, we are left wondering if it’s actually Mrs. March building that world.
"George March's latest novel is a smash. No one could be prouder than his dutiful wife, Mrs. March, who revels in his accolades. A careful creature of routine and decorum, she lives a precariously controlled existence on the Upper East Side until one morning, when
the shopkeeper of her favorite patisserie suggests that her husband's latest protagonist-a detestable character named Johanna-is based on Mrs. March herself. Clutching her ostrich leather pocketbook and mint-colored gloves, she flees the shop. What could have merited this humiliation?
That one casual remark robs Mrs. March of the belief that she knew everything about her husband-and herself-thus sending her on an increasingly paranoid journey that begins within the pages of a book. While snooping in George's office, Mrs. March finds a
newspaper clipping about a missing woman. Did George have anything to do with her disappearance? He's been going on a lot of “hunting trips” up north with his editor lately, leaving Mrs. March all alone at night with her tormented thoughts, and the cockroaches
that have suddenly started to appear, and strange breathing noises ... As she begins to decode her husband's secrets, her deafening anxiety and fierce determination threaten everyone in her wake-including her stoic housekeeper, Martha, and her unobtrusive son,
Jonathan, whom she loves so profoundly, when she remembers to love him at all.
Combining a Hitchcockian sensibility with wickedly dark humor, Virginia Feito, a brilliantly talented and, at times, mischievous newcomer, offers a razor-sharp exploration of the fragility of identity. A mesmerizing novel of psychological suspense and casebook
insecurity turned full-blown neurosis, Mrs. March will have you second-guessing your own seemingly familiar reflection in the mirror.
Editorial Reviews
06/28/2021
Societal roles so thoroughly define the titular Upper East Side Manhattan matron of Feito’s elegantly written, unflinchingly observed debut—first as the unwanted younger daughter in a frosty upper-crust New York family, now as the fastidious wife of literary sensation George March—that her first name isn’t revealed until the final sentence. And Mrs. March’s sense of self is sufficiently tenuous that it takes but a throwaway inquiry from the clerk at her favorite patisserie concerning whether the protagonist in George’s current bestseller was modeled on her to trigger the initial tremors of an emotional earthquake. The increasingly delusional Mrs. March becomes convinced that her husband may have murdered a young woman in Maine during one of his annual hunting trips, a hypothesis she attempts to investigate. Though the suspense remains high up to the horrific final surprise, much of this woman-pushed-to-the-brink-of-madness story feels familiar, and if not for some contemporary references, Mrs. March’s breakdown could be occurring in a Henry James drawing room. One looks forward to Feito training her clearly considerable talents on fresher material next time around. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary. (Aug.)
"Feito locks the reader up inside the fracturing psyche of a woman of privilege ... through excruciatingly precise renderings of grotesque delusions... Feito masterfully orchestrates the bewildering horrors of Mrs. March’s breakdown... Feito's bravura gothic thriller brilliantly exposes monstrous consequences of covert neglect and cruelty."
"I delighted in every page of this clever, twisted debut.... Feito’s fiendish narrator presents Mrs. March to readers like a fine wine, uncorked, zooming in and out of Mrs. March’s paranoia as her psyche unravels. This book is an intoxicating experience."
"[Feito] manages to capture this world entirely, while simultaneously ratcheting up the tension caused by Mrs. March’s increasingly fractured psyche, in a way that recalls novels by Patricia Highsmith and Margaret Millar. And like these predecessors, Feito explores issues of autonomy, insecurity and madness, all wrapped up in the domestic life of a housewife whose whole being has been shaped and molded by how she believes others view her. Feito works hard to make sure readers know that there is something amiss in this character’s fragile mind.... The final pages are shocking... readers may find themselves tempted to return to the beginning in order to understand just what Feito has so convincingly managed to achieve within her accomplished debut."
"Like Mrs. March herself, I spent most of Virginia Feito’s trippy novel wondering, What the devil is going on? When she figured it out, I was haunted for days."
"Essential reading for the social media era.... [A] brilliant debut novel.... A brilliantly tense psychological study from a writer who keeps pace with the grandees she invokes – Du Maurier, for one.... It’s also a fine addition to the current wave of feminist-inflected horror.... But what makes Mrs March most unsettling of all is that Feito’s meticulous construction of a collapsing mental world is underpinned by piercing insight into “normal” minds. The chilly paranoia that Mrs March experiences, the belief that everyone is judging her as she is judging them, the appalling prospect that she is known not on her own terms, but as someone else has portrayed her – all these are the regular nightmares of the regular status-hungry person in the social media hall of mirrors.... Feito has done that most horrible, wonderful and truly novelistic of things: she has seen right through Mrs March and into the shameful, petty, maggotty secrets that everybody carries."
"Mrs. March is window-dressed to perfection as a psychological thriller-cum-cosmopolitan grotesque.... [Mrs. March] could be describing Feito's novel when she refers to the life of the prostitute in George's book as ‘something so ugly described so beautifully."
"[A] vicious, gorgeous thriller.... A little bit Hitchcock, a little bit Patricia Highsmith, a little bit “The Yellow Wallpaper”.... There’s a relentless build to this book, a gnawing dread that sets in early and never quite lets up. And between Feito’s silver-polish sentences and her eerie psychological acumen, you don’t want it to."
"As literary as it is pulpy, Mrs. March straddles the line between psychological thriller and social satire — think HBO’s The Undoing or The Talented Mr. Ripley. Like those blockbuster titles, Mrs. March portrays a rarefied world as hellish Grand Guignol. The pleasure of the book is in watching all that psychotic menace come out into the open, and in trying to figure how much of it is actually real. Mrs. March might think she sees a woman across the street drenched in blood—but what if she’s simply had too much wine? She might believe the figures in a painting have turned their backs on her—but what if she’s just crazy?.... Indeed, for all its gleeful nastiness, Mrs. March is very much a comedy of manners—one where every Vicuna scarf and monogrammed napkin signifies something greater than itself."
"Feito’s noirish debut novel left me rapt, gleefully ambivalent about her eponymous protagonist: did I like her? Did I find her funny? Did I want to hug her? Was I bit a scared of her? Did I relate to her? To all of the above: yes.... This is an elegant, claustrophobic psychological thriller that bears the influence of a handful of brilliant writers, from Shirley Jackson to Daphne du Maurier to Patricia Highsmith, but feels incredibly original. The film is bound to be gorgeous – the Hitchcockian foreboding and stifling, velvety interiors feel made for the screen – but read the book first. Mrs March is the most beguiling protagonist I’ve encountered in a long time; I can’t remember when I was last so excited about a new voice in fiction."
"Mrs. March is painfully aware of [genre] tropes and leans into them so far as to subvert them.... By initially setting up Mrs. March as a domestic thriller that comments on the relegation of women to the home and the elevation of men’s careers and creative pursuits, the perfect foundation is laid for Mrs. March to escape all of that and fantasize—and materialize—that she’s in her own crime novel, taking the dead girl muse trope into her own hands.... Masterful."
"This crisp, delicious portrait of a woman coming apart is a brutal, darkly funny, sharp blade of a book. I loved it."
"Mrs. March is just the Madame Bovary-meets-Patricia Highsmith feminist psychoanalytic comedy-of-manners thriller that I didn't know I so desperately needed. I almost destroyed my life by staying up so late reading. I am lucky my house is still standing."
08/01/2021
DEBUT Mrs. March hasn't read the recent best-selling book by her husband George; all she's gleaned is that its main character is an unlikable, weathered woman. When a clerk at the local patisserie tells her that the book's protagonist seems to be based on Mrs. March herself, she's floored: "'But…—isn't she…' Mrs. March leaned in and in almost a whisper said, 'a whore?'" She runs out of the bakery, imagining all of her Upper East Side neighbors reading the book and laughing at her. Days later, she finds on George's desk a newspaper clipping about the recent disappearance of a young Maine girl named Sylvia; it reports that police have learned that she was beaten, raped, and murdered. George makes frequent trips to a hunting lodge in the area of the disappearance, and Mrs. March begins to imagine him as Sylvia's killer. Soon she travels to Maine and connives her way into Sylvia's home, where she spots signed copies of several of George's books; in her mind, this certifies her husband's guilt. Mrs. March's flights of fantasy now progress to psychotic episodes and flashbacks to her stoic upbringing; even readers will begin to question what is real and what is imagined. VERDICT Feito's debut can be classified as a literary psychological thriller, but it doesn't fit neatly into one genre. Fans of novels about psychological degeneration will be satisfied.—Edward Goldberg, Syosset P.L., NY
When a local shopkeeper suggests that the main character in the bestselling novel of Mrs. March’s husband may be based on Mrs. March herself, a series of doubts creep into Mrs. March's mind—which fester into severe paranoia. Elisabeth Rodgers’s calm narration is the perfect match for this audiobook. Her well-honed timing helps build the tension as Mrs. March loses touch with reality and becomes increasingly unreliable, leaving the listener wondering where the truth lies. Rodgers’s characterization of Mrs. March creates an unreliable protagonist who is struggling internally yet is unable to ask for help. Although the story is set in an unspecified time, it feels like the 1950s, when awareness of mental health issues was still in its infancy. K.J.P. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
★ 2021-06-02
In a horror-laced psychological drama, the wife of a bestselling New York novelist learns his latest protagonist is modeled on her.
“But…isn't she...a whore?” whispers Mrs. March to the woman behind the counter at the patisserie she visits daily, who, like every other person in Manhattan, is reading, and loving, her husband's new book. Abandoning her purchases, she bolts from the store, never to return, and immediately confronts an advertisement featuring a woman smiling knowingly under the words "SHE HAD NO IDEA." Even the billboards know! This is just one of innumerable creepy details that speed Mrs. March's descent into a spiraling vortex of psychosis. Not that it's all in her head—copies of the book are everywhere, even in someone's cart at the grocery store. Debut novelist Feito sets her story in a hazy period in the pre-technology past and confines much of the action to her protagonist's claustrophobic Upper East Side apartment, where terrifying literati regularly convene for unbearable parties. Mrs. March's painfully low self-esteem drives the self-consciousness, paranoia, and jealousy that control her relationships with everyone from her housekeeper to her son to a family she runs into at the skating rink. The husband is there on a weekday? She thrills to speculate this means he's been laid off and concocts an elaborate lie to cover the real reason her own son is not in school. Mrs. March is the only character in the book who doesn't get a first name, even in a flashback to her childhood: "On tiptoes, Mrs. March cupped her hand and whispered into her mother's ear...'I have to go to the bathroom.' " While the poor woman never gets a break from the misery, Feito does offer the reader a few homeopathic drops of humor, such as when her protagonist learns that people will do just about anything you ask if you tell them you work for the New York Times. Feito is Spanish and lives in Madrid, but somehow she is the love child of Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson.
On her way to the screen played by Elisabeth Moss, Mrs. March is absolutely right—everyone is talking about her.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940173162335 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Recorded Books, LLC |
| Publication date: | 08/10/2021 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Videos
