With Regrets

I spent the entire book rooting for the Glimmer, if that tells you anything.

These are all deeply unpleasant people thrown together for a dinner event Britta, social media influencer and overuser of hashtags, is putting on to curry favor with some brand she wants to partner with. But her marriage is failing, her kids are more props to her than people, and her friends just don't understand how important this dinner is to her. Liz is also there, shepherding her own failing marriage for not caring about social standing like her husband does, who goes batshit crazy once the Glimmer hits and everyone is stuck in Britta's basement. Every chapter of hers is about how she misses her kids and has no faith in either them or their babysitter to do anything right, and even sets a fire in the basement as a last resort to try and get emergency services to come during a lockdown. Padma is there too, but exists more as a plot device about needing to pump, giving Liz an excuse to rob Britta's house under the guise of looking for a pump, and mastitis. Mabel rounds out the cast of women here, but all the book cares about her is that her husband cheats on her repeatedly and she takes it. There's guys there too, but the book doesn't really care about them beyond being drama fountains.

You never find out what the Glimmer actually was (alien? plague? pathogen?), so all you're really here for is to follow the drama this group of rich people contrive for themselves. The book also moves at a breakneck pace, never really allowing a reader to orient themselves in a scene before blowing onto the next drama plot point. I rolled my eyes more than a few times at how contrived some of the scenes were. Spoilers here: Liz is conveniently a writer for a dystopian TV show and has a bunker and months of supplies in her basement. Britta's husband has a car that has a bio filter, armored like a tank, and allows anyone driving it to instantly become a stunt driver without training. Britta's house has everything from breast pumps to a massive basement so there's never really any threat to our characters, but no antibiotics for Padma because we need her to be sick. There's more examples, but you get the idea.

A quick read, but a disappointing one.