Review of The Ingenue by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

*The Ingenue* by Rachel Kapelke-Dale (2022). Published by St. Martin’s Press.

Some books are the ones you stumble upon when you take a nice long walk through the library one day, and I will say The Ingenue is something I one day stumbled upon when I was going through the new fiction section.

It was a Tuesday morning and I was one of the only people that was in the library at the time, and I had already picked up a huge stack of books to read. I was telling myself no more books when I picked this one up, and I knew I was intrigued when I saw the title on the spine because of my background in film studies.

Granted, this was not at all about film, but the synopsis on the book jacket ultimately ended up sucking me into the book and deciding to check it out.

I started reading it not longer after, but then guess what? I got COVID.

It took me about two weeks to finish this book because of that because I was about sixty pages in when COVID knocked me out for a week straight, then I just didn’t feel like reading because as a freelancer, I was very behind because of not doing work for a couple of days. I did end up finishing the book somewhat quickly once I was better, but there was a period where I didn’t think I was actually going to finish this.

Onwards with the review—I’ve rambled enough!

When Saskia’s mother dies, she is shocked to see the house left behind to a man with a direct connection to her.

Our protagonist in The Ingenue is Saskia, who a thirty-something year old who’s washed up in her career. She was a major piano child prodigy who randomly quit one day, then she left her hometown in Wisconsin to go to NYU and study computer science.

She had been at Juilliard but dropped out for a normal career, which has led her astray in the eyes of her mother. However, at the start of the novel, she has to return to Milwaukee because her mother has suddenly passed away. Or suddenly to her—it seems everyone except Saskia knew that her mother was very sick.

There’s a catch here though. Saskia’s family owns a very old historic home called the Elf House, and when her mother dies, it is no question that the house will go to Saskia.

The house goes to all of the women in the family, but she is enraged to realize during a memorial service that the house has been left to Patrick, one of her mother’s coworkers at the university she worked at. Saskia’s mother was a famed illustrator and wrote a second generation feminist book that still gets immense royalties to this day.

Saskia wants to fight this, despite her father not wanting to do so, and she starts digging. First she realizes that everyone outside of the familial circle thought the house was going to Saskia, then she finds the tax documents and realizes that the family actually couldn’t afford to keep the home.

Her mother’s income was solely going towards taxes and maintenance of such a large place. When a former high school classmate who had a crush on her back then—and probably still has that crush—invites Saskia to an art exhibit at the local museum, everything clicks.

Patrick has his own photographs on display at the exhibit, and Saskia realizes that every little girl in his photos were in a relationship with him—including her. Every other chapter goes back into Saskia’s childhood and digs deeper into the truth behind her relationship with Patrick and how he was grooming her.

As it turns out, she ended up quitting piano because of Patrick, not because of health or some random mental breakdown. Saskia begins to doubt further that the house was given to Patrick for art students at the school, and she starts meeting the other women in the photos.

The first one, now a teacher, admits that their relationship was one that wasn’t good. The other woman is still on good terms with Patrick, which leads Saskia nowhere. Saskia ends up giving her lease up at her apartment, as she now realizes the publisher for her mother’s next book wants her advance back because they have nothing to publish. Now Saskia is going to be the one to finish it whether she wants to or not because they don’t have that money.

At the same time, Saskia continues her little cat and mouse game with Patrick. All of this culminates in her finding child pornography taken by Patrick in her mother’s safe, which she then realizes her mother traded the house for her daughter’s and the other girl’s photos. Saskia tells her lawyer, who plans to use this in court, but Saskia ends up kidnapping Patrick and ultimately burns the house down with him inside. His reputation is ruined once the pornography aspect comes out in his career, and the novel ends there.

Overall Thoughts

Regardless of the COIVD and stopping and starting, I don’t think I super into this novel. I thought that it was trying to do too much all at once, tapping into a bunch of different themes and didn’t spend enough time fleshing each of them out before we get to that fiery conclusion.

There’s such a compelling hook because the plot and the character of Saskia, but I simply couldn’t get invested behind all of this. I think that someone else out there would really enjoy this novel though—taste is subjective. The writing itself is good and I think the plot is fine, but I wanted more from the novel at the end of the day.

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