Honestly, I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed this book! It’s a bit outside my usual genre preferences, but I decided to give it a try anyway based on the sapphic and somewhat mysterious angle, and I’m very pleased I did. I Am Agatha is the story of eccentric and somewhat misanthropic artist Agatha Smithson, who in her late sixties/early seventies moves to New Mexico and builds a house on Mesa Portales. There, she strikes up a friendship with Alice, the widow who owns the land where her house sits, and that friendship becomes a relationship that ultimately challenges everything Agatha believes about herself and what it means to move through the world.
I absolutely loved Agatha’s voice. Not to say that I always loved Agatha as a character—she is abrasive, self-centered, dismissive, and very “my way or the highway” stubborn especially about interpersonal relationships—but her narrative voice was absolutely wonderful to me. She’s funny, surprisingly reflective sometimes, straightforward, blunt and a little odd in ways that remind me of the narrator from Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. She has so much personality, and to me that makes her an incredibly compelling narrator despite her many personality flaws. The novel’s prose is really driven by this idiosyncratic worldview and I think Agatha’s voice is strongly reflected in Foley’s figurative language and word choice.
As far as the plot, I could see an argument that the plot itself is kind of short, but to me it was so well-informed by Agatha’s personality that the short timeline worked well. By nature, because Agatha is so damn stubborn and set in her ways, she becomes an unreliable narrator of her own life and the reader is left to fill in gaps based on the comments and behaviors of others around her. Even though the “mystery” part of the novel turns out not to be much of a mystery, I felt that it fit really well into the story and the context the reader gathers about Agatha’s life both before Alice and with her.
Overall I think this was a really enjoyable novel to read and I appreciate the chance to do so! Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC, which I received in exchange for an honest review.
Pleasure: ★★★★☆
Purpose: ★★★★★
Prose: ★★★★★
Plot: ★★★☆☆
Personal: ★★★★☆