Review of The Cloisters by Katy Hays

“I knew how impossible it was for people who hadn’t experienced the loss of a loved one to understand how it remade your world in terrible, strange ways. That you couldn’t judge someone for how they grieved was an understanding Rachel and I shared.”

— Katy Hays

Lately, in the time of writing this, I have been on such an art history and art school in fiction case.

There’s been a lot of books I’ve read and will be reviewing (check out the blog tab, or click book reviews to see what I’ve been up to reading-wise) that are set in museums and art school, and it has been such a vibe.

I always say 2021 was the year of dead mothers in nonfiction, but the end of 2022 has clearly been having some art school and MFA trauma when it comes to the fiction world. Anyways, I found this novel on someone’s Instagram story and decided to check it out. Saw it had some buzz, then I checked it out at my library.

Turns out, there was a massive waitlist for this book when I wanted it at the library, so I ended up having to wait three weeks. That was fine. Then, when it was finally in my hands, I ended up reading the entire book over the course of a day. I have mixed feelings about this one, but I can see how other people love it a lot.

The writing’s pretty good, albeit a tad trope-y when it comes to the main character. Now that I’m reading a ton of these art school and art history fiction novels, I’m spotting a lot of the protagonists are weirdly similar.

Anyways! Onwards with the review.

Ann arrives in New York City to work at the MET and finds a completely new job—with some murder—instead.

The main character in this one is Ann, if you could not tell from the header above. At the beginning of the novel, she is graduating from Whitman College in Washington, which also has been weirdly appearing in several of these novels I’ve been reading these days.

What’s up with Whitman College? I’d literally never heard of it until I delved into the genre. Anyways, she majored in art history, specializing in Medieval and Renaissance studies, and had an ancient professor that doesn’t leave his office as her advisor.

He’s considered the recluse of the school and the department, and previously taught at Princeton, but for the sake of this novel he has selected her as his chosen one and ended up landing her a Summer Associate gig at the MET in New York City. Not bad, isn’t it?

Until Ann gets there. She finds out her potential boss took another job abroad, and the HR lady is about to let her go right there when a miracle falls from the sky. Patrick, one of the bosses and researchers at The Cloisters further up in the city, reveals that one of their associates has left and he needs someone immediately.

He demands Ann join them at The Cloisters, much to the HR lady’s protests, and she gets the gig. There, she meets an eclectic group of people with the pedigree degrees she’s never had the opportunity to get. One of them is Rachel, a wealthy orphan who works at The Cloisters and has a budding career over at Yale. Ann doesn’t feel like she fits in at first, so she begins to buddy up with the rough gardener, Leo.

The first chunk of this book is split into three distinct sections: Ann and Rachel slowly becoming very good friends, a romance with Leo that seems slightly ratchet at times, and Patrick attempting to do tarot card research.

There are trips to the antiques dealer to pick up tarot cards that they believe originally are from the 1500s, but then are led to think they are from the 1700 or 1800s. Spoiler: they are not. Ann peels off the back layer of the card and discovers a completely different one underneath, and ends up telling Rachel about it. Cue: their newfound friendship.

Rachel is an orphan, as her parents tragically drowned when she was a kid. The ship they were on at their vacation home sank in the middle of the night, and Rachel was found on a beach wearing a life jacket. Her parents, unfortunately, did not make it.

Thus she inherited the entire estate, lives in a NYC apartment by Central Park all by herself, and occasionally takes people up to the vacation home, like Ann once they’re really close. Because Ann tells Rachel about her findings, they end up pairing up and deciding to do their own research to publish at the end of the summer. Rachel, however, keeps warning Ann about her romance with Leo getting in the way.

Leo is an interesting character. He takes Ann to bands in the Bronx, runs his own illegal growing operation in The Cloisters and sells it to uppity white women. Later in the novel, it’s revealed that he is kind of a player and actually dated Rachel before, but as we soon come to learn, Rachel isn’t as nice as we’re led to think.

The real mystery begins in the second part of this book, when it’s revealed that Rachel isn’t who she seems to be. A former classmate of Ann’s, a couple years old, warns Ann about Rachel when they meet at a party, saying that everyone becomes close to Rachel ends up dead. Her parents, a freshman year roommate in college, and soon enough, Patrick ends up poisoned in his office and dies.

Ann seems like the next target, and when Leo ends up fired after he’s caught stealing objects in the archives, she realizes that Rachel has too. Rachel invited Ann to live with her in the apartment, which ends up being a bane after Ann begins to suspect Rachel for everything going on.

It seems like Ann is next, but, at the end of the novel, Ann ends up being the cause of Rachel’s death: a drowning. This seems like a lot packed into the course of roughly three hundred pages, and, to be frank, I thought this novel could have been longer. All of this happens to quickly that it doesn’t allow the reader to process everything going on, and it honestly is kind of overwhelming.

Overall Thoughts

I think it’s a really interesting story and well-written at times. I found the main character to fall flat, especially towards her motives when the final ending comes to light. It’s kind of mentioned as an afterthought what she did to Rachel, and how she publishes the paper without Rachel’s name in the novel’s concluding pages. It’s an entertaining novel, yes, but I found myself wishing for more from it.

That doesn’t make it bad at all, I just think that it didn’t reach the full amount of potential it had. The setting of The Cloisters is interesting, but also the romance with Leo felt completely and utterly unnecessary throughout. I kind of imagined him as a guy who doesn’t shower and isn’t attractive, but that’s me.

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