You know that Ira Glass speech about the gap between an early creative's good taste and their ability to produce work that is consistent with that taste? That is how this novel felt to me.

Gardiner clearly has incredible taste. The whole time I was reading this novel I was very aware of what it was trying to be, and I'd say it succeeded in being that about 50% of the time. There are moments when Gardiner's sentence-level prose is divine, especially in the "recitative" chapters, and I thought the switches between first- and third-person narration within a chapter structure meant to mimic the structure of an opera was an inspired, if ambitious, idea. And, most importantly, the heart is definitely there: the tragedy of La Maupin's brief, passionate quest to be known and loved as she is and not as she ought to be, her refusal to sacrifice any part of herself to be more palatable, and the loneliness that ultimately came with that refusal -- La Maupin's story is in there, but it only packs a fraction of the punch that it should.

Gardiner's taste outstripped her ability; she clearly has the potential to reach "goddess"-status with a work like this (and who knows, maybe she has reached that potential by now, since this book was published five years ago), but ultimately the heavy-handedness of the "goddess" motif, a general clumsiness with POV outside of the recitatives, and what felt to me like a reticence to really dwell in the more emotional moments of the story without glancing artsily off of them kept it from hitting its mark.