The Paper Wasp: A Novel

By Lauren Acampora

“Take The Talented Mr. Ripley, cross it with Suspiria, add a dash of La La Land and mix . . . and this arty psychological stalker novel is what might result.” —The New York Times Book Review

Named a Best Book of the Summer by The New York Times, O Magazine, Elle, Town & Country, Tatler, and Publishers Weekly and one of “5 books not to miss” by USA Today

In small-town Michigan, Abby Graven leads a solitary life. Once a bright student on the cusp of a promising art career, she now languishes in her childhood home, trudging to and from her job as a supermarket cashier. Each day she is taunted from the magazine racks by the success of her former best friend Elise, a rising Hollywood starlet whose life in pictures Abby obsessively scrapbooks. At night, Abby escapes through the films of her favorite director, Auguste Perren, a cult figure known for his creative institute the Rhizome. Inspired by Perren, Abby draws fantastical storyboards based on her often premonitory dreams, a visionary gift she keeps hidden.

When Abby encounters Elise again at their high school reunion, she’s surprised and warmed that Elise still considers her not only a friend but a brilliant storyteller and true artist. Elise’s unexpected faith in Abby reignites in her a dormant hunger, and when Elise offhandedly tells Abby to look her up if she’s ever in LA, Abby soon arrives on her doorstep. There, Abby discovers that while Elise is flourishing professionally, she is lonely and disillusioned behind her glossy magazine veneer. Ever the supportive friend, Abby becomes enmeshed in Elise’s world, even as she guards her own dark secret and burning desire for greatness. As she edges closer to Elise, the Rhizome, and her own artistic ambitions, the dynamic shifts between the two friends—until Abby can see only one way to grasp the future that awaits her.

An electrifying novel by the author of The Wonder Garden, The Paper Wasp is a knife-edge story of dark friendship and twisted ambition against the backdrop of contemporary Hollywood.

“[A] page turner . . . a stunning portrait of a fixated woman and an addictive, modern commentary on an eternal theme of obsession . . . Lauren Acampora gives us a soul trip/head trip/rarefied LA trip replete with surrealism and social commentary.” —Caroline Kepnes, author of You

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9780802147080

Lauren Acampora

Lauren Acampora is the author of the novel The Paper Wasp. Her story collection, The Wonder Garden, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers and Indie Next selection, and named a best book of the year by Amazon and NPR.

Book preview

I.

I WORE red capris on the plane. After I’d resolved to go to you, I couldn’t imagine wearing anything else. The red made me feel bold, like a matador. I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, and it was still dark when I’d risen from bed and stuffed my suitcase with summer clothing. Despite my fevered state, I’d had the presence of mind to fill my backpack with old photographs, graphite and ink, and the best of my drawings.

The airplane seat beside me was unoccupied, so I was able to spread the drawings out on my lap. All at once you were there with me, resplendent on the sofa in your starry dress, the fiery wave of hair over your shoulder. Your eyes were the green of a forgotten lake, your sweet mouth quirked and curved. My own form in the drawing was a blunt shape beside you. Next to the sofa was the table lamp with its base of intertwined brass snakes. The potted orchid with its protruding tongue. The print of cardinals on the wall, and the painting of tents in the desert. And the energy, the love, coiling invisibly between us. I felt it all again. That moment was forever captive, mine.

Electricity prickled my fingertips as I looked at the drawings, and I wanted to run in the airplane aisles. Instead, I folded the papers away and emptied a bullet of bourbon into my Coke. My heart accelerated, an engine primed for action. I’d been waiting for this feeling to come, this gorgeous surge, and was proud of myself for channeling it so constructively, for boarding this plane. When this ecstatic state arrived, when I flew inside my skin like this, it was worth all the dark days, every periodic ugly lurch.

I paged through the issue of Dwell that I’d bought at the airport. Looking at beautiful rooms always settled me. Deeply, I breathed the recycled air of the cabin. I’d flown before, as a child, but had been cushioned by dumb trust. Now I understood that the plane could drop through the sky. I knew that every new moment contained this possibility, though it seemed remote through my exalted haze. I felt the exhilaration of a deity, with power over the future and past, capable of creating new worlds at will.

Slowly, the view outside my window transformed from a flat midwestern checkerboard to an exotic topography of pink and red mountains. This, then, was the West. The vast emptiness was startling. There were no roads. Nothing circumscribed the strata of rock. Only primeval scrub grass. Probably snakes and coyotes. Rodents in their burrows. All at once, the mountains genuflected and flattened. One last shallow range, then humankind. Roads spidered into the valley. Arteries of freeways and branching capillaries led to the cell of each house and its adjacent pool of blue. And finally—like a drop from the edge of the earth—the ocean. I’d never seen it before. I’d never been this far from my own house, from my bedroom and my box of magazine clippings. As the altitude of the aircraft decreased, I felt the thrilling intimation that I’d never enter that house again.

It had been just five weeks since I learned about the reunion. My mother had come home one evening more addled than usual. Her jacket, the same drab brown parka she’d been wearing for a decade, had missed the coat hook and dropped to the floor. She looked to me at the stove where I was frying chicken and making green bean casserole. I was the one who cooked, even though my father was home all day. After the layoffs, the men in town had become suddenly idle—machinists, inspectors, production engineers reduced to building deer stands, drinking Schlitz—and years later they were still idle.

How was your day? I ventured, whisking milk and eggs in a bowl.

The usual. A long pause. There was something skittish about her eyes. I saw Leslie Lomax in the office. She came in for a mammo.

Oh.

Do you remember Liz Lomax, in your class?

Sure.

Well, Leslie told me that Liz is going to your ten-year high school reunion. It’s on Wednesday. Did you know that? The night before Thanksgiving.

I looked at the pot on the stove in front of me. Is that right.

Leslie asked if you’re planning to go. It sounds like a lot of people from your class are going. She paused. Maybe Elise Van Dijk will be there.

My heart released a roll of blood.

I hope you’ll consider it, Abby, she said. It would be good for you to get out.

I kept whisking. Finally my pigeon instinct took over, and I nodded my head. Thanks for letting me know.

I’d planned to rewatch Land of the Beings after dinner, as I’d been doing all week, but instead I opened the memorabilia cabinet and took out our senior yearbook. I went straight to your page. The electric shock came before my brain even registered your face. All the years peeled back. There was nothing embarrassing or dated about your appearance: plain white scoop neck, undulating hair. You were glamorous, timeless. Beneath your photograph was a Bob Dylan lyric: You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. I’d been disdainful of this choice at the time. Now, I was struck by its precocity, and by the girl whose worldly-wise look suggested she knew exactly which way the wind was blowing for her, and had paused for just a moment to say good-bye.

Inside the back cover was your inscription, painfully formal: Abby, I’m sorry we’re not close anymore, but I hope we will be again someday. My love always, Elise.

I’d been having the loveseat dream more frequently. It had been coming, in some form or other, every week. In the dream, I tried to call you, but my fingers were too shaky to dial the digits of your phone number in the correct sequence. I tried several times before getting it right, before you finally answered, and I said, I’m here, I’m coming. I rushed through narrow alleys of a foreign city, looping in circles of frustration before finally finding the building—a stone structure covered with ivy, like an English manor house—and climbing the carpeted stairs to the room where you waited. Then, at last, the door swung open. In the dream, we sat together on a loveseat holding hands. You wore a gown of jet beads. I wore a black-and-violet sheath split by a white stripe. We talked and laughed and basked in each other. The desperation fell away; the regret of our lost years fell away. The objects around us were glazed with phosphorescence. I awoke at the apex of love.

This dream was so detailed and intentional that, each time it happened, I was certain it was really you, Elise. I believed that you sometimes came to me this way. I had no way of proving it, but I was convinced that the two of us were sharing this dream. I was never able to recall the actual words we exchanged, but I awoke with the imagery in my mind: the sinuous base of the table lamp beside us, the potted orchid, the print of cardinals on the wall, the framed watercolor of tents in a desert.

I sat at my vanity table and tore a long sheet from the roll of drawing paper. I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them, and with the pencil I began to outline the scene. Your body and mine on the burgundy cushions, your river of red hair, the lamp and its lamplight.

My breathing deepened, my heart rate slowed, and I fell into a narcotic lull. It was as if the pencil were controlled by an external force, as if the scene were preordained. It meant that you were coming back for me, as I’d always known you would. We would be reunited. All these years at home in Michigan—dreaming, drawing, watching Perren films, working the register at Meijer, treading water—had been leading to this. I’d long nurtured the private suspicion that I was an outcast not because I was inferior, but because I was exceptional; that the fulfillment of my purpose awaited activation from the universe; that I just needed to wait. And now, as simple as a music box clicking open, it was time.

I never told you—not even later, in our most intimate moments—that I’d been seeking you out in the magazines for years, ever since high school. All that time, I’d hungered for proof of your existence in the world, some mention of you, some small notation in a movie review, or a thumbnail photograph. Just knowing that you were alive, that you were thriving, helped rinse the demons from my mind. I clipped the photographs and articles meticulously and stored them in a pink fabric box beneath my bed. That box was my most precious possession, the first thing I’d save in a fire.

After my register shift was over that Friday, I approached the magazine rack at the checkout aisle. The usual mass formed in my throat. This moment just before I allowed myself to look at the magazines was always excruciating. And then, all at once. The clot broke open in my throat, and I could breathe again. There you were, vamping in a backless red dress, hand on hip, hair gelled into pin curls. Sportive smile aimed over your shoulder, directly at me.

Lifting the issue of People from the rack, I had the urge to gather all the copies for myself. I detested the idea of their being taken by others, whose interest in you was superficial at best, spiteful at worst. I stared at you, and our eyes locked. I remembered the slumber parties—how we’d squeeze into the same sleeping bag when the other girls were asleep, so close that your hair cascaded over both our faces. Now, I stood in the checkout line with the magazine, like a regular customer, like a stranger. I wanted to tell the woman behind me, with her bald eagle T-shirt and cartful of pet food, that I knew this person in People.

I know her. I knew her.

Instead, I gripped the magazine and showed it to the checkout clerk, a skinny teenager with a sniffle. Rather than letting his hands soil it, I swept it over the scanner myself.

Afterward, I drove around to the back of the Meijer superstore lot where there was a Goodwill shop. The windows displayed white-stumped mannequins in formal dresses with lamps and books at their feet. I stood at the entrance for a moment, gathering the nerve to go in, then laid my mittened hand on the door handle.

Inside, the clothing racks were acutely unglamorous, full of big peasant blouses and elasticized pants. I cautiously fingered the first rack, then turned and accidentally met the gaze of the store clerk. Her cat-eye glasses were intimidating, incongruous with the merchandise. After a moment, I cleared my throat and blurted, I need something to wear to my high school reunion.

The clerk looked coolly at me, passing her eyes up and down my body. I was sure she could read the whole story there: I was a fool to think about the reunion, a fool to consider exposing myself. True, it would be a mad aberration for me. For years, I’d been assiduous in my withdrawal. I commuted thirty minutes to work just to avoid seeing acquaintances. I’d chosen not to know about my classmates and to remain unknown by them. Let them scrabble with their social media; I didn’t have or want a computer or smartphone. The crush of information was overwhelming. I did best when my orbit was small, just my drawing paper and pencils, movies and magazines. Everyone could imagine what they wanted. Our valedictorian, what about her? Why reduce all the brilliant possibilities, now, to one hard, unbrilliant fact? Abby Graven, plain and stout, roundly unaccomplished, emotionally imbalanced, right there on a plate.

Then, from deep within a hidden rack, I pulled out a dress: half-black, half-violet with a white stripe down the middle. My breath caught. It was the dress from my dream, the same white bolt of lightning. The dress was magic—the purple audacious, the black forbidding, the stripe running from collar to hem. It cost four dollars and ninety-nine cents. As I carried it out of the store, I felt the deep clunk of a gear falling into place. I’d had prescient dreams before, but never as explicit as this. No one could tell me this was a coincidence. No doctor could convince me it was a symptom of delusion, attached to a mood cycle. Over the years, I’d come to realize that I was unlike anyone else. I knew that my visions were attached to something much larger, a giant scaffolding meant only for me, sections of which I could just glimpse, bit by bit, as I climbed.

Back home, I squirreled the dress in the rear of my closet and pulled the yearbook out again. There I was: fat-cheeked and stunned in a black turtleneck, my eyes latched to a focal point somewhere over the photographer’s head. My hair hung limp, black as a carrion crow. Beneath ran the words of Emily Brontë:

I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind. I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here?

I can still clean up when I need to. I’m not unattractive. There might even be something enticing about me if you look the right way, if you’re the right kind of person. My eyes are wide and yellow-hazel like a cat’s. My dark hair—jet when I dye it—is striking against my pale skin, and my patch of acne scars can be camouflaged with concealer. I’ve always been short and heavy, but the extra cushioning gives me curves. And so, looking at myself in the mirror on the day of the reunion, in the glass still gummy from old stickers, I wasn’t displeased. I put my shoulders back and posed a little. The dress was stiffer than I remembered, a little more severe, but maybe that was all right. It would be armor.

When the nerves came to my stomach, I exhaled all the way, emptied my lungs. There was nothing to fear, I told myself. You’d be there tonight. I knew you would. You’d be waiting for me, as in the dream. I calmly went for my lipstick. If there was a time for red, this was it.

Downstairs, my mother was standing at the sink, rinsing dishes beneath the faucet.

I’m going to the reunion, I announced.

You’re going! That’s great, Abby. I’m so glad.

As I went past her to the door, her smile cracked and for a clear instant I saw that she was imprisoned in this house, deteriorating with each passing year, commuting to work in the dirt-brown parka, breathing exhaust fumes on the highway.

Please be careful, she called after me. And promise you’ll let us know if you’ll be home later than midnight. Do you have your phone?

Yes, of course, I said, pushing the irritation from my voice. I’ll see you later.

Promise you’ll call.

Okay.

As she watched me go, she seemed to be begging for something beyond an assurance that I’d call, that I’d come home. I reached down to pull out the thing she needed, but not far enough. I went out the door and locked it behind me.

Usually when I drove through town, I wore sunglasses and a brimmed hat like a celebrity, though I was the antithesis of famous in my parents’ dented Impala. I played soothing music—Fleetwood Mac; Cat Stevens; Crosby, Stills and Nash—suggestive of an easier era, corded phones, and handwritten letters. Still, the other cars sometimes turned vicious. When I was in a vulnerable state, in one of my dark times, even tree branches seemed to bend toward me, fanged and taloned. At those times, I distrusted my own foot on the accelerator, the neurons of my own brain prone to mutiny. I fixated on the other drivers on the road—all of us sentenced to some detailed death, driving to our graves. It would be natural to jerk the steering wheel over an embankment. As I drove, I could see it happening. I could watch a weird hologram of my car veering off the road and out of sight.

Tonight, mercifully, there was no hologram. I’d be in the presence of my classmates soon, so I was free to prowl down Main Street undisguised. So many storefronts were empty, brown paper hanging behind the windows. On the side streets, most houses had crossed the line from homey to unkempt. After the auto plants shuttered, the media had reported that capable young people were draining out of the state, but I knew that most of my classmates had remained right here, raising dispirited families in these weatherworn houses.

I passed Everts Elementary and the concrete bench where you and I often sat. Opening the car windows, I breathed the cold, abrasive air. There were margins of black snow at the curbs, left from the first storm of the season. I steered west, away from town and toward the dunes, in the direction of your house.

How I’d loved your house, Elise. Compared with so many hovels in town, it was a palace. I’d loved to wander your living room—what I imagined might have been called a parlor in some other era—with its beige carpet, heavy glass table, and chairs with buttoned cushions. I’d loved the ingenuity with which, by adding an upper floor and black shutters, your parents had made their basic ranch resemble a New England colonial. To me, the way the deck reached out toward Lake Michigan symbolized some intrinsic human striving. It was a launching pad. Standing on the deck overlooking the water and the lighthouse, the stirrings of the future already in me, I felt that I could be lifted by the wind and carried anywhere in the world.

We played for hours. You wore your nightgown with ruffles at the hem and sleeves, a print of hearts erupting from clouds. I remember you in this nightgown, sitting on the toilet lid in the bathroom, plastic scepter in hand, as I knelt on the bath mat in front of you, giving directions. The rubber frogs, ducks, and crabs made a circle around us. Round and round the garden, you said at my prompting, and the animals came to life.

At night, the beam from the lighthouse would enter your bedroom, lay a stripe across your sleeping face, then lift away—and, from the trundle beside your sleigh bed, I’d count the beats until its return. It was utter safety, being in your room under a white eyelet comforter. I’d stay as long as I could after breakfast the next morning, until your mother would gently suggest that my parents would want me home soon.

The other girls blistered with jealousy. You were beautiful and I was not. I was neither witty nor mean. Still, I was the one you invited to sleep over every Saturday night. Our friendship was real and deep, our games transcendent. I knew that, as unlikely as it seemed, I brightened your life the way you brightened mine. Like the Brontë sisters, we’d created our own womb of imagination. Even then, I knew not everyone had that privilege. We were fortunate to dwell in dreams as long as we did. It’s easier to linger with a partner.

I didn’t let you see me when I was sad. But when I felt good, when my bright surges came, I showed off for you. I drew extravagant murals based on my stories. You held my hand and said, You’re going to be a great artist someday, Abby. I didn’t argue. I let you believe the world awaited me with the same hunger it awaited you. But the truth was that, as you were born to be seen, I was born to crouch in the shadows. I was the hidden source, quietly generating the scenes you played out. I knew this, even if I didn’t yet recognize mine as the superior gift.

One night at your house, toward the end of middle school, we fell upon an Auguste Perren film. It was Eureka Valley, one of his earliest

Reviews for The Paper Wasp

[rmarcin-630843 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was bizarre! Abby and Elise have been friends since they were in kindergarten, but grew apart when Elise starting getting acting jobs in high school. As Elise’s start rose, Abby obsessively tracks Elise through magazine articles. After reconnecting at their high school reunion, Abby decides to visit Elise in CA. Abby works her way into Elise’s life, wanting more out of their friendship than Elise is prepared to give. This is a story of obsession, strange dreams, and taking what isn’t yours. Really strange!

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Paper Wasp is the story of Abby and Elise, who were very close growing up in Michigan, and then Elise and family moved away, and they lost touch. Ten years later, after she has become a movie star and a celebrity, she shows up at their lowly Michigan high school reunion. While talking with Abby, Elise drops the line, “If you’re ever in L.A. call me.” She does give Abby her private number, but only Elise truly knows how sincerely she meant it. In Abby’s mind she’s thinking, “You smiled then, and I saw the ghost of my childhood friend beneath the famous features, a pencil sketch beneath an oil painting.” Months later, after comparing the depressed rust belt of Michigan to images of beautiful movie stars and palm trees, Abby moves to Los Angeles … and immediately calls her former best friend. They meet, and since she has no place to stay and very little money, Elise invites her to stay in her large L.A. home. At first, she’s just a house guest, and Elise buys her some less-embarrassing clothes, takes her to some trendy places, and promises to introduce her to the right movie people to help her get some work in the movies. Abby has brought along many of her sketches and is always thinking about production and design work as she draws more. Eventually she’s hired as Elise’s personal assistant and things seem generally good on the surface between the two. But it’s a tenuous relationship between a new rising celebrity who’s always worried about appearances and advancing her career, and Abby who is ultra-sensitive to any slight she perceives from Elsie, a tone of voice more like an order from an employer, than a request from a friend? Elise’s stress levels go off the charts when she is cast as the lead in a Joan Didion biopic, which seems well beyond her depth. Abby also has some very strange dreams and it doesn’t take long before the reader starts wondering how reliable Abby is as the story’s narrator. Even when compared to the sensitive and insecure Elise, it becomes apparent that Abby has some real emotional and mental problems of her own. Just as Abby imagines a somewhat workable balance between the two being reached, Elise’s steamy relationship with her drop-dead-handsome-Hollywood-playboy boyfriend, Rafael, comes to a head—when Elise discovers she’s pregnant. ‘“It’s the baby, or me,” Rafael is heard yelling in another room. Abby sees the threat of a quick marriage disrupting Abby and Elise’s girlfriend balance. Then, when Rafael says that he cannot handle the whole marriage and baby situation, relief floods Abby’s world just as heartache floods Elise’s. Then Rafael has a change of heart and they are quickly wed. Just like that Abby is told to find an apartment nearby to continue to work as personal assistant and now part-time childcare assistant. So far, this is the standard tabloid version, one that doesn’t tell much of the parts of the story that had the Hollywood Reporter describe the novel as “Hollyweirdness,” and other reviews mentioning the book’s similarities to The Talented Mr. Ripley. This relates to the aforementioned mental problems and unfulfilled dreams. Abby’s descriptions of her odd and demented dreams are a flashing warning light to where her mind can go. Abby takes off on a trip to visit her white trash sister back in Michigan. At first Abby considers kidnapping her sister Shelby’s seriously neglected child, but settles for just stealing her purse and ID for a new identity. Abby returns to LA, moves out of the big house, and lives in a friend’s cabin. Elise and Rafael’s tenuous marriage ends in divorce and soon there are tabloid stories of her drunk in public with the baby. And then … come on, you don’t get all the sordid details. Okay, just a few other story elements. There’s Abby’s close L.A. movie friend Paul, who is obsessed with finishing his film on refugee children in hopes of getting the word out and getting them help. And there’s Rhizome, a trendy self-improvement center for the filthy rich that Elise introduces her to, and where Abby secretly gets work caring for the celebrity children in the daycare there (including Elise’s), in exchange for therapy sessions for herself. The book is an interesting tale of fame and relationships, ambition and insecurity, friendship and deceit, mental health and what is real or imagined. In the end things go seriously off the tracks and Abby’s reality may have been a victim of the unreliable narrator. Does she end up living in Switzerland with someone? Curious.

[brookiexlicious · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

WOW. Just WOW. Not since “Baby Teeth” have I been deeply engrossed or unsettled by a book. This is not a large book, and I’m a fairly fast reader who expected to complete this one in a couple of days. But once I started reading I slowed down and really absorbed the characters and the story. There were several paragraphs that I found myself rereading, just to get a better grasp on understanding what I had just read, or ones that spoke so sharply to my own past that I had to take a moment and wonder “is the author psychic or am I not the only one who has experienced this?”While reading this, I was often reminded of many films I’ve seen that I’m sure lent some inspiration to the plot: “Ingrid Goes West, “Donnie Darko”, “Single White Female”, and “All About Eve”, among others.After the reunion, Abby takes up an offer from Elise and joins her in The City of Stars. Abby and Elise couldn’t be happier that their friendship has been rekindled, but not even the best of intentions are pure it seems. We get glimpses into the past of the true nature of their friendship, and how it fizzled.Elise is part of a group that attends an creative institute secluded in the woods, one that believes that our selves can transport through the waking and dreaming state, among other unique perspectives of discovering the Self. The institute also happens to be overseen by Abby’s famed director, and she attends each class with the hope of meeting him and showing him her work, which is largely inspired by his films and her own dreams. There were times when I didn’t think the book would “go there”, and to my delighted surprise it didn’t just “go there”, but it stayed put and built a home. I saw parts of my younger self in Abby, her desires and dreams; I felt her melancholy at being stuck in her hometown, working a dead end job, and being witness to the triumphs of her classmates that bring a stark awareness to your own failures. This book wasn’t pretty at times, but that’s one of the reasons I loved it. It can also be confusing, as there are certain passages where you don’t know where the dream ends and reality begins. I absolutely loved this book and have already bought my own copy, and I will highly recommend it to others.

[vickimarie2002 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hmmm. This book was very interesting. I struggled with the star rating. It’s a good book but yet, left me feeling kind of empty. But then again, maybe that’s the point. Abby and Elise’s friendship is not at all healthy, and it’s all just so strange. The writing is good, which made it enjoyable, but it’s so weird with all the Perren and the Rhizome. To sum it all up, good but strange.....but in a good way. (This review is as strange as the book!)

[mmccullough_33 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Subject to anxiety, panic attacks, and depression, Abby is struggling with life in general and her art career specifically. When Abby’s best friend from high school, now a Hollywood actress, comes back into her life, the story changes dramatically. “The Paper Wasp” is a thought provoking novel that examines ones control over self and other people in a profound manner.

[jypsylynn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

love the cover art. The Paper Wasp is a dark and twisted story of obsession and longing. Abie and Elise were high school friends. They drift apart. Now, several years on, Abie is a common woman, and Elise is a starlet. Abie is nothing, and Elise is everything. After briefly breconnecting at a reunion, Abie goes to basically live with Elise in her fancy house in California. Abie becomes obsessed because she just wants to be something else. The plot is intriguing and different from other books I've read. The characters are likeable and not likeable. It's a back and forth with this story. It's a dark twisted psychological thriller that fans of the genre will enjoy. Thanks to NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

[hubblegal-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Abby has high hopes for a career making movies but she’s still living at home with her parents and working at a local supermarket. She keeps all magazine and newspaper articles about her friend, Elise, who has gone on to become a movie actress. She meets Elise again at a school reunion and is thrilled that Elise not only remembers how close they were but wants them to become close again. Elise gives Abby her phone number, swearing her to secrecy, and tells her to give her a call if she’s ever in LA. Abby steals her parents’ credit card and surprises Elise in LA where she finds an Elise more vulnerable than Abby imagined. Abby is pulled more and more into Elise’s world. When things begin to shift in their relationship, Abby’s desires and ambitions take a strange turn.I’ve always been attracted to books about obsession. This one satisfies in that regard. Abby’s obsessions with Elise makes for an absorbing read. Abby is a character who at first I felt sympathy for but she soon becomes a much darker character. The end gave me chills as unbelievable as it was and played out as obsessions so often do.On the negative side, a large part of this book is about dreams and their meanings. Abby believes she has dreams that foretell the future and that when she dreams of people, they are actually there and that they are dreaming the same dream. I had a hard time staying focused during these forays into fantasy. Abby actually becomes a member of the Rhizome, an organization who interviews its members about their dreams. It was very strange and I can’t say I enjoyed these sections of the book much.While parts of this book were well worth the time spent, as a whole it didn’t leave much of an impression on me and is not one that I would recommend. It felt a bit too much like a Young Adult or Chick Lit, although on the dark side, for me.This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.

[conniemcmartin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I totally relate to the others who have said, “What did I just read?” but I really liked this one a lot. It is very introspective and atmospheric, with a dreamlike quality. Almost like a David Lynch film, but in its own style on its own merits. I haven't read The Wonder Garden, so I can't make comparisons there. I recently read Looker (Laura Sims) which was fairly similar insomuch as it was told from the first person point of view and is a novel about obsession. While I enjoyed Looker, I liked this one a little better. I found the prose unique and captivating at times, and there was a little more to offer due to this particular protagonist's imagination/creativity. This is not a plot heavy book but more like a character study, and it's a slow burn for sure. Since I love character-driven fiction, this one was perfect for me. I'm not sure what to think about the ending but it fit well with the rest of the book.

[djcuthbert84 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lauren Acampora has written a dark gem of a novel, filled with characters who are both sketches and yet also fully realized portraits of tortured souls in deep, internal crises.Employing a first person style that allows her to explore her main character’s thoughts while also shielding her from the reader’s attempts at guessing ultimate actions, Acampora has done a masterly job of giving us an anti-hero that we will both sympathize with and recoil at when the novel reaches its finale. She writes of a Hollywood culture that will seem very familiar to anyone keen to watch a blockbuster film or follow the actions of the latest “it” actor or actress. But this novel should not be viewed solely as a cautionary tale of Hollywood chewing up the human soul. This more gets at the question of how tainted those souls might already be to begin with.This is a fever dream of a story that is only too eager to drive down the rabbit hole into darkness. You would be remiss if you missed your chance to experience it.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.5 This is one of the those books that you finish reading and wonder what is was you just read. Not because I didn't understand it, or at least most of it, but because it was so different, so strange. It's very strangeness is also what I found intriguing. From the beginning it had snow ominious tone, that increases as one reads. Abbi, once had alot of promise, but ultimately found her life unfulfilling. Her early friendship with Elise, a friendship that meant everything, becomes estranged when Elise goes to Hollywood, on her way to becoming a star. They reconnect at their ten year school reunion and eventually Abbi makes her way to Hollywid and immerses herself in Elises life. A novel of obsession, stalking, amongst the Hollywood of cults, hidden directors that prey in the literal sense of it's stars. A mysterious director of cult films, that Abbi had long been obsessed with, and his mysterious institute. Abbi lives inside her dream life, and dreams are what send many to Hollywood, but are the dreams real? I loved this authors first book, a book of connecting stories that were also very different. This her first novel, and like her first exceedingly well written. Can the stuff of dreams turn into a nightmare? Can dreams become a persons reality? "You hadn't been filled, over all these years,but had been left carefully hollow. This, I imagined, was why actresses cracked so easily with age, like glass vases--why they were so swiftly and thoroughly ruined.""For so long I'd intended to the winds of suggestion, relied on the subtle cues of the universe and my own sublimal moods. It's difficult, impossible really, for any of us to know all the ways were tethered to unknown forces, or to gauge the true reasons for our actions. Were open-pored beings, after all. We're lotus roots suspended in the Spring and haired with tentacles, instinctual creatures wearing halos of consciousness."What would you be willing to do, how far would you go, to make your dreams s reality?ARC from Edelweiss.

[jillrey · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Abby was the top of her high school class academically, using her artistic brilliance she enrolls in the University of Michigan only to wind up back at her parents' house. But, upon hearing of her 10 year high school reunion she slithers back into the school gym at the potential of her old friend Elise's presence. Elise and Abby inseparable in childhood faded by Elise's fame in Hollywood as she disappeared from the Midwest and created a life for herself on the coast. Just as the reunion wraps up Elise invites Abby to visit if she ever finds herself in L.A. Uprooting herself from a life of nothingness in Michigan, Abby makes her way to L.A. and calls Eloise. The life Abby begins to create for herself in Eloise's presence, through her encouragement turn Abby's in art and thoughts into a disturbing vortex. Written through the oddly unstable mind of Abby this story was parts tormenting and parts rich. *Disclaimer: A review copy was provided by the publisher. All opinions are my own.