TL;DR REVIEW: love the author, didn't love the book

Full disclosure, the author is actually an acquaintance of mine. She and I have been in various Facebook writer groups together for years, I've helped her with a couple of her contracts, etc. ... so I am a little biased and regardless of my issues with the book, I'll be giving her a good rating and review on Amazon, and will encourage others to read it (as I did when it first became available on Amazon First Reads).


Here's the synopsis:


The main issue I had with the book was the characters. Both Grace and Jackie are genuinely awful people and we're given absolutely nothing to sympathize with them about. Jackie is frail and aging and has to move in with her daughter... but she's critical and judgmental, often for no reason whatsoever. Grace, on the other hand, catfishes people for fun (she even refers to her online projects as "damsels" that she needs to save... by impersonating good guys they think they're e-dating) and completely loses her shit over the smallest of things. Jackie hangs up a couple of her own pictures in the living room and Grace is all all OMG MOM YOU DON'T RESPECT MY SPACE. Jackie reorganizes the kitchen and Grace is basically like MOM YOU'RE AN F'ING MONSTER WTF, IS WRONG WITH YOU. Grace spends more time worrying about caring for her best friend's cat than she does her mother. I spent half this book going, "Wow, Jackie's a real bitch," and the other half going, "Grace is literally psychotic."


Add to that the fact that the supporting characters are all tropes (Miguel, Grace's gay Latino hairdresser best friend who call each other "lovey" and greet each other with air kisses and decadent brunch items all the time) or literally random (the book has a prologue and epilogue featuring a therapist named Silas... and it's revealed that the book is apparently Grace recounting events to Silas in session... but Silas has literally no other purpose in the story and doesn't add anything to the narrative).

The story plays with the idea of blurring the lines between dreams and reality, but there were several points where I had to stop, go back, and reread entire sections of the book to make sure I was clear on what was happening. This technique was very effective once or twice (there's a very good part where Grace basically hallucinates an entire day where she and Jackie make amends and move forward, and the realization that it was just a dream is devastating), but overall I'm not a fan of books where I have to consistently reread entire passages to understand what I'm reading.

Spoiler ▼

At the end of the book, it's unclear whether there's a supernatural/paranormal element to Grace's experience, or if it's just her own psychosis. But in the epilogue, Silas mentions he's happy to be working with Grace because he, too, has been having very vivid hallucinations/dreams. While I do love a "reader's choice" ending where there's ambiguity to be left up to the reader to decide what happened, I'm less of a fan of that device when it's applied so broadly that there's a "what even happened here" vibe to the story.

Ultimately, if this was intended to be a book about awful people with mental health issues making each other miserable during the pandemic and pushing each other so far that one of them kills the other... mission accomplished? But even then, the teases about supernatural elements and other odds and ends in the story really distract from that narrative by opening up a lot of other possibilities/questions.

I always support my author friends and try to read their books whenever possible. I've enjoyed Zoje's other books, and I'm sure I will enjoy others in the future... but this one was a miss for me.

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Created Apr 06, 2024 at 12:33pm • Submit your own review...