Hoping to escape the pain of the recent murder of her best friend, art student Zoe Beech finds herself studying abroad in the bohemian capital of Europe: Berlin. Zoe, rudderless, relies on the arrangements of fellow exchange student Hailey Mader, who idolizes Warhol and Britney Spears and wants nothing more than to be an art star. On Craigslist, Hailey unknowingly stumbles on an apartment sublet posted by a well-known thriller writer. Soon they realize that their landlady Beatrice, who is supposed to be on a residency in Vienna, is watching them--and her next book appears to be based on their lives.
... feels timely ... Such a premise could be ponderous and pretentious but isn’t at all, because there’s murder: this is a very good plot-driven thriller dressed in a glittery jumpsuit. The story is multilayered, touching on sex, female friendship, queerness, Berlin nightlife, drugs, celebrity culture and art in ways that in less confident hands could easily have become a mess ... Instead, there’s an exuberance to this novel that makes it highly lovable ... very funny ... there are laugh-out-loud lines throughout, and Henkel’s turn of phrase adds beauty to the mundane ... With so much going on, the murder strand of the plot could end up as little more than corsetry, but instead it keeps you hooked, keeping the novel’s more profound questions about the intersection of art and life, and the cannibalisation of human experience for fiction, from becoming pompous. It’s a whirlwind that leaves you slightly hungover, with the lingering feeling that Henkel has pulled off something very clever, while making it look easy. Which it isn’t, at all.
... the most fun novel I’ve read this year ... Told at the breathless pace of gossip, full of delicious details as though shared over a bottle of wine with a best friend au fait with both high and low culture ... As things spiral out of control, the reader starts to wonder who, exactly, is holding the reins. I kept reading late into the night to find out, enjoying every moment.
This is Zoe’s story, even if Hailey is the one with her foot on the gas and her unsteady hand on the wheel. Henkel is at her best digging into Zoe’s quest to establish her artistic identity as well as her sexual one. While she might follow Hailey’s lead, she is on a journey of her own, navigating queerness and grief while contending with a world that doesn’t really care about how you feel, only about how cool you are. Henkel knows that it is when you are struggling to define yourself that you are most vulnerable to the predations of others ... Zoe’s Berlin is summoned in exciting and visceral detail. Henkel deploys a spectacular range of senses from the gaudy sight of costumes at a theater sale to the sweaty, orgiastic tangle on the dance floor of a sex club, the damp chill of everything to the grinding headache in the aftermath of too much cut-rate booze. The grungy student life feels all too real ... Secondary characters come and go at a remove — never quite coming into focus, which may be intentional. The effect is much like scrolling through Facebook, linking a face to a few scattershot details, which is an interesting and accurate way to reflect on those transitory acquaintances from your very early 20s, people who pass through but don’t stick ... The truly monstrous delights of Other People’s Clothes come from Zoe and Hailey’s twisted friendship and Hailey’s mantra that 'art is what you can get away with'...Megan Abbott, the queen of toxic female entanglements, has proved that there’s enough rancid meat on the bones of friendships such as Zoe and Hailey’s to make additional drama seem like overkill. And this is where Other People’s Clothes begins to falter ... The last quarter of the book is jammed with a cascade of violence, hairpin twists and wild revelations that land with the mock gravitas of a Law & Order episode. The effect, I imagine, is like something out of one of Beatrice Becks’s airport novels, which is a shame because up until that moment Henkel’s own book was so much more. I found myself wishing that Henkel had delivered a story worthy of the real Amanda Knox instead of her tabloid counterpart.
