She Treads Softly: The Last Session

Thursday, March 13, 2025

The Last Session

The Last Session by Julia Bartz
4/1/25; 368 pages
Atria/Emily Bestler Books

The Last Session by Julia Bartz is a so-so locked-room thriller that starts out strong but quickly requires more setting disbelief aside than I'm willing to undertake.

Thea is a social worker who offers art therapy to patients in a New York psychiatric clinic. One day catatonic patient is admitted and Thea figures out that it’s Catherine O’Brien, star of Stargirl, a movie she obsessed over as a teen. When Catherine is signed out by two people pretending to be her parents, Thea decides to find out where she was taken. This leads her to a remote cult-like center in Southwestern New Mexico.

The opening scene will grab your attention. After that the tension is high throughout and the plot moves at a good pace but then it does the literary equivalent of jumping the shark - multiple times.

It gets two stars because I read it. I shouldn't have. Thanks to Atria for providing me with an advance reader's copy via Edelweiss. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.