Monarch
A Novel
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the 2022 Over the Rainbow Recommended Book List
The cryptic worlds of Hanna and Stranger Things mingle with the dark humor of Dare Me in this debut novel about a teen beauty queen who discovers she’s been a sleeper agent in a deep state government program
After waking up with a strange taste in her mouth and mysterious bruises, former child pageant star Jessica Clink unwittingly begins an investigation into a nefarious deep state underworld. Equipped with the eccentric education of her father, Dr. Clink (a professor of Boredom Studies and the founder of an elite study group known as the Devil’s Workshop), Jessica uncovers a disquieting connection between her former life as a beauty queen and an offshoot of Project MKUltra known as MONARCH.
As Jessica moves closer to the truth, she begins to suspect the involvement of everyone around her, including her own mother, Grethe (a Norwegian pageant queen turned occult American wellness guru for suburban housewives). With the help of Christine (her black-lipsticked riot grrrl babysitter and confidante), Jessica sets out to take down Project MONARCH. More importantly, she must discover if her first love, fellow teen queen Veronica Marshall, was genuine or yet another deep state plant.
Merging iconic true crime stories of the ’90s (Lorena Bobbitt, Nicole Brown Simpson, and JonBenét Ramsey) with theories of human consciousness, folklore, and a perennial cultural fixation with dead girls, MONARCH questions the shadow sides of self-concept: Who are you if you don’t know yourself?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Child beauty pageants collide with a CIA mind control program in this bonkers debut novel from poet Wuehle (Death Industrial Complex). Jessica Clink, a precocious beauty queen, bulldozes her competition in pageants until she's 13, when she falls for Veronica, her rival, in 1993. Her mother, a deposed Norwegian royal, busies herself hosting parties to tout an antiaging cryo chamber, while her professor father is absorbed in studying crimes of passion. They hire Christine, a young goth woman, as Jessica's babysitter. After Jessica's coach forces her to sabotage Veronica, Christine convinces her to quit the pageants. Jessica then falls into bouts of sleepwalking and wakes up with mysterious bruises and gaps in her memory. In 1999, as a college student working at a photography store, Jessica develops a series of lurid crime-scene photos that trigger a flood of memories, prompting her mother to reveal that Jessica was a sleeper agent in Monarch, an offshoot of MKUltra. Now Jessica is out to find vengeance—and the truth about Veronica. Wuehle's fever dream impressively connects a series of such true crime cases as Lorena Bobbitt's and the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson with Jessica's coming of age and her theorizing as to the purpose of her teenage life. Readers sturdy enough to peer into this glittering, multifaceted novel will find weaponized beauty reflected back.
