The assignment leads him in strange and sinister directions, his naivety often exploited by bad actors and power players. “A rollicking trickster of a novel, wondrously funny and wickedly addictive,” lauds Maria Semple, Simon’s dilemma grows thornier when he meets The Vixen’s author, the beautiful, reckless, seductive Anya Partridge, ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental asylum. THE VIXEN is the latest novel from critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose. Because Simon has a secret that, at the height of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings, he cannot reveal: his beloved mother was a childhood friend of Ethel Rosenberg’s. But Simon’s first assignment-editing The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic, a lurid bodice-ripper improbably based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a potboiler intended to shore up the firm’s failing finances-makes him question the cost of admission. Thrust into a glittering world of martini lunches, exclusive literary salons, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, Simon finds himself a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family in Coney Island. The year is 1953, and Simon Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate, has landed an editorial role at a distinguished New York City publisher.

My review is based on my experience of the book and any thoughts expressed here are solely mine alone. Thank you to Anne Cater, Random Things Tours and Harper 360 for my gifted copy and for having me on the blog tour for this book. Available: 5th August 2021 in Hardback, eBook and Audiobook

The vixen francine prose review