Caro
I really wanted to love this one but it just never fully clicked for me. The setup sounds great on paper: Moon is a washed up actress and recovering addict mourning her lover and former TV husband, and her daughter Stevie is stuck in her orbit, broke and dying to get away from her mom and from Hollywood altogether. When money gets tight they end up crammed into the glass walled pool house out back while their actual house gets rented out, and things get even messier when Adam, Moon's old TV son and Stevie's lifelong crush, shows up for the funeral. So there is a ton going on, and yet for some reason I kind of struggled to get into the story almost the whole way through.
I think part of my problem was that I never really found a way in emotionally. The book has plenty to say about class, fame, grief and that whole post pandemic LA emptiness, and I could see what Choi was going for, this idea of two women play acting a perfect family in a place where the perfect family was always a fiction. But it just didn't resonate with me the way I hoped. I kept waiting to feel something for Moon or Stevie and mostly I just watched them from a distance.
That said I do not think it is a bad book at all, it just was not for me, and honestly a lot of that is probably a me thing rather than a Choi thing. The writing is sharp and she clearly knows this world and these glamorous messy people inside out. Three stars feels about right, there were flashes I really liked and the themes are genuinely meaty, maybe I just was not in the right headspace for it.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC
I really wanted to love this one but it just never fully clicked for me. The setup sounds great on paper: Moon is a washed up actress and recovering addict mourning her lover and former TV husband, and her daughter Stevie is stuck in her orbit, broke and dying to get away from her mom and from Hollywood altogether. When money gets tight they end up crammed into the glass walled pool house out back while their actual house gets rented out, and things get even messier when Adam, Moon's old TV son and Stevie's lifelong crush, shows up for the funeral. So there is a ton going on, and yet for some reason I kind of struggled to get into the story almost the whole way through.
I think part of my problem was that I never really found a way in emotionally. The book has plenty to say about class, fame, grief and that whole post pandemic LA emptiness, and I could see what Choi was going for, this idea of two women play acting a perfect family in a place where the perfect family was always a fiction. But it just didn't resonate with me the way I hoped. I kept waiting to feel something for Moon or Stevie and mostly I just watched them from a distance.
That said I do not think it is a bad book at all, it just was not for me, and honestly a lot of that is probably a me thing rather than a Choi thing. The writing is sharp and she clearly knows this world and these glamorous messy people inside out. Three stars feels about right, there were flashes I really liked and the themes are genuinely meaty, maybe I just was not in the right headspace for it.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC