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Starred review from October 15, 2018
Jealousy rears its ugly head in Sims’s chilling and riveting debut. The unnamed narrator is a middle-aged evening school professor who recently separated from her husband, Nathan, after their prolonged inability to become pregnant. She lives in an unnamed city—but probably Brooklyn—down the block from a famous actress (referred to as “the actress” throughout), her screenwriter husband, and their three young children. The narrator can’t help comparing her drab life to the actress’s glamorous one and is constantly fantasizing about her fairy tale lifestyle. The narrator leads a lonely existence, but there are a few others who populate it, including Mrs. H, her nosy neighbor; Bernardo, her poetry student whom she thinks is coming on to her; and Cat, Nathan’s pet that he left behind. She does odd things such as stealing castoff objects (Birkenstocks, a child’s bike) left outside the actress’s townhouse and using them to build a shrine to her in her apartment. Then, at a block party, the narrator tries to make meaningful contact with the actress, but events conspire disastrously against her, and it’s all downhill from there, bottoming out in a tragedy. In this tightly plotted novel, Sims takes the reader fully into the mind of a woman becoming increasingly unhinged, and turns her emotionally fraught journey into a provocative tale about the dangers of coveting what belongs to another.

October 15, 2018
A woman destabilized by her infertility and impending divorce obsesses over her next door neighbor, an actress who seems to have it all.After years trying to achieve her dream of being a tenured professor of English in the big city with a husband, children, and even a cat to round things out, the unnamed narrator of poet Sims' (Staying Alive, 2016, etc.) first foray into fiction has hit a wall. Infertility forced her to give up her dreams of motherhood; her husband has left her. She's only managed to make lecturer at her university, teaching a night class on poetry to seven students. At least she's got the cat. As the woman stews in bitterness over her fate, she fixates on the actress, who recently made the move from indie darling to blockbuster star. The narrator watches the actress through her lit windows at dusk: The actress has a handsome husband, three beautiful children, a cook, a nanny. As the narrator's divorce grows more acrimonious, she makes a series of increasingly unhinged decisions--ranging from stealing from the actress's garden to getting involved with one of her poetry students--and accelerates toward inevitable disaster. Like a modern-day version of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," Sims' novel shows the warped reality and claustrophobic mentality of a person losing a grip on her moral compass. But this reality is conveyed with slack language and a piling on of plot turns out of Single White Female or Fatal Attraction, which seems especially bewildering from Sims, the author of four well-regarded collections of poetry. In fact, the novel has some of its most original and electric moments when the narrator dives into the edgy poems she teaches her students.That this novel gallops along at top speed doesn't disguise the overly familiar scenery going by along the way.

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DEBUT The wine-drinking, window-watching, stoop-sitting unnamed narrator of Sims's gripping and intense debut gets her kicks from quietly spying on her famous actress neighbor and her family. As the narrator's marriage unravels, her fixation with the actress gets darker and more lethal. When the two meet at the neighborhood block party, and the narrator's attempt to make contact goes badly, she falls down a rabbit hole of fixated mania, becoming more and more obsessed to the point of building a shrine of household items found on the street in front of the actress's house in her own rundown brownstone apartment. Meanwhile, her dead-end job as a night school poetry professor goes south as her fantasies of a student edge toward reality. VERDICT While brief, this twisted and tightly coiled tale will define obsession on a new level.--Erin Holt, Williamson Cty. P.L., Franklin, TN