OTHER PEOPLE'S CLOTHES

Two women escape the mundanity of their New York City college lives to reinvent themselves in Berlin, leading to unexpectedly dark consequences.

At the end of their sophomore year, Zoe Beech and Hailey Mader are both ready to escape New York and the hypercompetitive culture of their art college, where the irreverent “sculpture bros” are universally worshiped and “the easiest way to dismiss a female’s work [is] by calling it domestic.” Zoe, though, is also spurred by a darker reason: the recent murder of her best friend, Ivy Noble, who’d been a dancer at Juilliard. Once at a study abroad program in Berlin, Zoe quickly grows close with her classmate Hailey, the magnetic, brazen daughter of a Midwestern supermarket-chain mogul. The two navigate their way through dark and isolating Berlin, waiting in hundred-person lines for exclusive clubs, attending insular gallery shows and art classes with fossilized professors, always slightly removed from the heart of the city’s social scene. Things shift, though, when they begin subletting an apartment from a creepy, enigmatic duo: Beatrice Becks, a helmet-haired mystery novelist, and her mother, Janet. In the perpetually dark apartment, the two become fixated with Beatrice; the more they sift through her “tax filings, photo albums and letters,” the more unsettlingly present she feels. As Zoe and Hailey compete socially and stumble their way through drug-filled parties wearing elaborate vintage costumes, they aim to live out the increasingly risky, brightly colored nights of their dreams, fueled by Hailey’s dictum that “art is what you can get away with,” no matter the cost. Henkel masterfully brings every inch of Hailey and Zoe’s world to life with her live-wire prose: German, for instance, sounds as violent as “a car being compressed into a cube.” But what truly pushes the plot forward is the obsessive, psychologically damaging friendship between Zoe and Hailey, which slowly leads them from a cocoon of insulated partying to a state of real danger: a finely negotiated shift. Though the book’s middle grows a little long and unwieldy, its specter of mystery is tantalizing and will keep readers captive till the final page.

Absorbing and electric.