Editorial Content for The Ingenue

Rachel Kapelke-Dale's debut novel, THE BALLERINAS, was an in-depth exploration of the ways in which female friendships both flourish in and are stifled by the high-pressure, high-stakes world of professional dance. In her second book, THE INGENUE, she focuses again on an art form, but one that is much more solitary in nature: classical piano.

Saskia Kreis was once a renowned child prodigy, with the international concert tours and contest medals to prove it. Practicing the piano for over six hours a day, plus spending much of the year on the road, made it practically impossible for her to develop close relationships with her peers. But her mother, Evie (a visual artist and writer of feminist fairy tales), and her father, Mike (a professional cellist), always supported her extraordinary gifts and assured her that she, too, was exceptional. Despite that early promise, though, something happened in Saskia's late teens that resulted in her walking away from what seemed to be a promising career on the concert stage.

"Kapelke-Dale somehow manages to make even tax liens feel suspenseful. The ending, while abrupt, is both surprising and satisfyingly inevitable, leaving readers to speculate about what Saskia's future might bring."

Now, 20 years later, Saskia is in her mid-30s, returning home to Milwaukee in the wake of her mother's death. She and her parents clearly had not been as close as they once were. Evie declined to inform Saskia about the severity of her condition until it was too late, and Saskia hasn't told her dad that she has lost her computer programming job and is instead writing SAT questions for $15 apiece.

Saskia assumes that this will be a brief visit, but that's before she encounters her old classmate, Josh, at her mother's memorial service. Now an estate lawyer, Josh is the executor of Evie's estate, and he has an unwelcome surprise for Saskia and her father. The grand Milwaukee mansion, which has been in Evie's family for generations, will not be passed down to the next generation. Instead of leaving the so-called Elf House to Saskia or Mike, Evie has chosen to give it to an unlikely beneficiary. Saskia is desperate not only to preserve her inheritance but to keep her treasured childhood home out of the hands of someone who --- she's realized belatedly --- once harmed her and others.

THE INGENUE unfolds in two parallel chronologies, one of which proceeds during Saskia's teenage years and the other of which takes place in the wake of Evie's death. Both timelines inform one another, as Saskia's increasing understanding of what happened to her as a young woman --- and the stakes that it carried --- mirrors the reader's own growing awareness. Each chapter also opens with an excerpt from one of Evie's feminist fairy tale retellings, which in turn comment obliquely on Saskia's real-life situation and the ways in which her mother's fables of female empowerment both do and don't reflect her reality, now or in the past.

At times the book threatens to get bogged down in the minutiae of estate and property law, but Kapelke-Dale somehow manages to make even tax liens feel suspenseful. The ending, while abrupt, is both surprising and satisfyingly inevitable, leaving readers to speculate about what Saskia's future might bring.