The Watermark

November 25, 2024
Inception meets Stranger than Fiction in this ambitious meta adventure from Mills (The Fragments of My Father). When Jaime wins a contest to interview reclusive author Augustus Fate, he mostly hopes to impress his online crush Rachel, the woman who introduced him to Fate’s books. Fate has other plans, however. The novelist has hit on a mystical solution to his plotting problems: he kidnaps people, drugs them, and sends their consciousnesses to inhabit the characters in his novels. Transported to a fictionalized Victorian-era Oxford, Jaime obliviously lives as Thomas, a young Dickensian protagonist—until he meets beautiful governess Rachel, and they realize they’re trapped. But the only way out of Fate’s book is into someone else’s. Careening through stories, from an idealized present in Manchester to the bleak past of czarist Russia and a future full of angst and robots, Jaime and Rachel live out entire lives together in hopes of finding their way back to the only one that matters. Mills piles five books into one and, aside from a few too-cute moments, manages to largely avoid the pitfalls of writing about writing. Her fluid command of each vastly different genre serves to highlight what stays the same in each—the strengths, faults, and deep bond of Rachel and Jaime. Readers will be impressed. Agent: Dan Milachewski, UTA.

December 13, 2024

Young journalist Jaime finally has a promising assignment: interviewing reclusive novelist Augustus Fate about his latest work. Little does Jaime know that Fate has been struggling to make his characters lifelike and has found a new strategy--trapping real people inside his books. Forced inside Fate's latest novel, Jaime encounters Rachel, his troubled online friend who recently disappeared. In their attempts to escape Fate, Jaime and Rachel jump from novel to novel, but as their relationship and memories shift with each new life, can they find their way back to the real world? Mills crafts a clever metafictional narrative that adeptly moves between genres and styles as it follows Rachel and Jaime all the way from Victorian England to a heavily automated sci-fi future. Their repeating cycle of amnesia, recall, and escape can grow repetitive, but the central thread is Jaime and Rachel's evolving relationship--a tentative romance between two struggling young people that asks what can be built on the stories everyone tells themselves. VERDICT Mills's (The Fragments of My Father) latest is a creative, genre-hopping literary journey.--Erin Niederberger

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2025
Jaime is a graduate student studying death in literature when he wins a competition to interview Augustus Fate, a famously reclusive writer living in rural Wales. However, Fate is struggling to enliven his characters in his latest work and has discovered a means to trap people within his stories, keeping their bodies prisoners in his secluded cottage and using their minds to bring depth to his creations. When ensnared, Jaime first finds himself in Victorian England, and trapped with him is Rachel, whom Jaime has previously met online. The narrative jumps across space--from northern England to southern England to just outside Russia--and also across time, from the Victorian era to a superbly imagined near future. Consistent through these layers is a love story between Jaime and Rachel, similar to those in Mark Danielle's Only Revolutions (2006) and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), and a distinct, whimsical charm reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's monumental world building. Mills' kaleidoscopic novel, like her earlier work The Quiddity of Will Self (2012), is an imaginative tour-de-force, one that never collapses under the weight of its hugely ambitious structure. In a breathtaking, captivating page-turner full of surprises and gloriously inventive narrative devices, Mills deftly demonstrates how enormously entertaining metafictional novels can be.

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February 15, 2025
A romp across genres encompasses a bookish mystery. The portentously named Augustus Fate is "one of the most famous and celebrated authors alive today." He's also a world-class loon. Young Jaime Lancia is your standard underachiever, though not for want of trying: At the beginning of Mills' novel, he's filled out more than 540 job applications. Landing an interview with Fate may land Jaime a journalism gig, and so he heads to the Welsh countryside to find the great man, who meets him not in the resplendent cape of his author photos but "wearing a navy jumper with holes in it, a pair of brown corduroys and sandals, displaying a row of large, gnarled toes." Fate is more interested in Jaime's tale than his own, especially when it comes to Jaime's yearning for Rachel Levy, so much so that Jaime winds up inventing tales about her to see what Fate will do with them: "The thought of him stealing my lies and weaving them into his prose, confident all the while that he was turning life into art, made me smile." Well, abracadabra, Fate does him much better, stealing Jaime and Rachel away and locking them into a series of stories, one Dickensian, one a kind of pastiche Gogol, one set in London a generation or so after Jaime's own day. "My novel is but a refuge from this world," says one of several narrators, one of them Rachel, who at one point says, self-referentially, "We're going to crash....Funny how panic turns you into a narrator." David Mitchell did much of this work, crash and all, with considerably more skill inCloud Atlas, and not all of Mills' rhetorical flourishes ring true. But her yarn has its moments, and it's a passable entertainment. A middling fantasy, with some nice touches for the metamagically-inclined bookworm.

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