Anita de Monte Laughs Last

• Author: Xochitl Gonzalez
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Publication Date: March 5, 2024
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

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.

Gonzalez won me over with her layered and multifaceted debut, Olga Dies Dreaming, so naturally I couldn’t pass this one up. I was provided the opportunity to read this in audiobook format, and it was absolutely brilliant. It was narrated by three narrators, Jessica Pimentel, Jonathan Gregg, and Stacy Gonzalez, and they all did a wonderful job with breathing life into the characters and their story.

In many ways, this is a more simple story than her debut, but the way in which it is told displays her mastery in a completely different way. The stories of Anita and Raquel are told in dual timelines; that of Anita’s in 1985 and Raquel’s in 1998, yet they echo each other. Both Anita and Raquel are Latina women maneuvering in the predominantly white, upper-class circles of the art world, an arena that is largely new to them. And while Anita made choices that had me wondering what the heck she was thinking, the parallels in Raquel’s timeline told me exactly what was going on in her head as she made the same choices.

However similar their life choices are, there are differences between them. Anita has a loud, brash, and often over-the-top personality, while Raquel tends to behave in a more meek and passive fashion, facing a lot of internal resistance to speaking up that Anita doesn’t seem to have. I especially loved the narrator’s presentation of Anita, and how she wasn’t afraid to sound borderline unhinged at times. I enjoyed the marked difference in their characters, 

There’s one other perspective that we get in this story, and that was a bold move on the part of Gonzalez. She offers us a few chapters through the eyes of Jack, the wealthy, white husband of Anita, and delivers a spot-on rendering of his character. His character is echoed in that of Raquel’s white advisor, who subtly guides Raquel’s choices through a combination of praise when she makes the “right” choice, overt disapproval when she makes a choice he doesn’t agree with, microaggressions, and leading statements. 

And while the death of Anita de Monte is known from the start of the novel, there are some questions surrounding her death, and why her name has been basically erased from the art world. When Raquel stumbles across this, she can’t help but become intrigued. Ana’s story is fixed, but as we learn more about the distant past, we also get to watch Raquel grow and change, discovering who she is and who she wants to be, among the socioeconomic elites of the art world, where people like her are few and far between. The pacing is solid and steady and the plot was an interesting one, but the real attraction of this book for me was the characters—how full and rich their personalities were, the way that they interacted with each other, and the parallels that were revealed between these two very different women, one a Cuban-American artist who is a rising star in the art world, and the other a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent studying art history, navigating art, love, racism, and classism. This is a solid follow up to Gonzalez’s debut, and it has cemented her place as an author I enjoy.

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