Book #18 |
Book: Audition | Author: Katie Kitamura | |
| Source: Library loan Format: Print |
Pages: 197 | Duration: 03/14/26 – 03/16/26 (3 days) | |
| Rating: ★★★★☆ | Genres: fiction, family, identity, existentialism, acting | ||
| 📕10-word summary: A woman, her husband, and possibly her son contemplate identity. 🖌6-word review: Compelling storytelling with lots of ambiguity. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “Lou immediately stood and went to him, and I remember thinking that even if he was without talent he would enjoy some level of success, in some capacity, he had a face that was made for being looked at.” | |||
| 🎓New-to-me words: languorous, sinuous, carapace, mottled, avidity, rictus, contrapuntal | |||
| Description:* Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day — partner, parent, creator, muse — and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||
| Thoughts: I loved the author’s voice in this story. I kept thinking of this book as very, very interesting — as opposed to fascinating. The beginning of Part II brought forth the figurative “record scratch” eliciting a great big “HUH???” from me. I’m not a fan of ambiguous endings, which this book definitely has — and in fact, there’s a lot of ambiguity throughout it — but I was surprisingly okay with it. What I wasn’t okay with was not one, not two, but three instances of the (overused & my nemesis) word, conspiratorially. | |||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2026 and previous years: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.
