LEE WIND'S PAGE: The Different Kind series, A DIFFERENT KIND OF BRAVE & A DIFFERENT KIND OF ENEMY

A DIFFERENT KIND OF ENEMY (Different Kind series: Book Two)
LEE WIND
Interlude Press - Duet Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: An anomaly in space has stopped in Earth’s path in a way not accounted for by astronomical physics. Is it aliens? With only six days before inevitable contact, newly married teen spies Nicolas “Nico” Hall and Samuel “Sam” Solomon are enlisted to investigate—each young man sworn to secrecy even from the other.

Nico is in the field looking for answers and tracking a mysterious Person of Interest. Sam is working first contact scenarios on the thirteenth floor of a Manhattan building that doesn’t officially have a thirteenth floor. And they're both wondering if the rules of love change if it’s the end of the world.

As humanity slips into the grip of alien invasion panic, Nico and Sam realize they're going to have to work together to save the world—and their marriage.

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My Review: Oh boy.

SF plots really, really do not work this way in 2026. If I suggested fifteen as the target reader for book one, this one's maybe thirteen, and only if not a reader of SF. The number of ways I could think of for a mildly motivated fifteen-year-old to circumvent the ridiculous rules keeping the boys artificially apart...! Plus, how'd they get MARRIED? And why? And how'd they embed themselves in these inredibly high-stakes shenanigans?

Middle grade readers are most likely to roll with the incongruities. Even there I slightly hesitate because married teenagers? Who use worty dirds? Who have intimate talks? I don't know a lot of parents likely to be too terribly comfortable with that idea! Still...the right thirteen-year-old, maybe.

More accurately the right parent of a middle-grader. Or an older teen who's not interested in SF?

For me the read was never going to reach great heights of esteem because I've been reading SF for decades and this ignores realities of science at every turn. Yes, it's a fantastical premise from giddy-up to whoa but...well, you see how badly mismatched to the read I was.

I was glad to see Nico and Sam in something that felt more like a close relationship because they're each so deeply lonely. They come across as real, genuine friends, people I could imagine had things to talk about and thoughts to share.

There's a message I can solidly back sending to young gay lads and lesbian lasses.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BRAVE (Different Kind series: Book One)
LEE WIND
Interlude Press - Duet Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Nicolas “Nico” Hall is sixteen when he escapes from Dr. H’s religious gay reprogramming institute in California. On his own, he assumes one identity after another to avoid recapture as he flees south to Peru and then to Mexico.

Seven days older than Nico, Samuel “Sam” Jonas Solomon is a privileged Upper West Side only child who idolizes James Bond. When his heart is broken, he vows that, like Bond, he’s never going to trust in love again. Then he meets Nico, and his heart won’t listen to any logic.

Nico’s survived by living only for himself—until his love for Sam has him risking his freedom for others. And as much as Sam wants to be like 007, he discovers that James Bond is a terrible role model.

Together, Nico and Sam set out to free the other teens trapped in Dr. H’s Institute, plunging readers into perils, drama, and a long-shot chance at love. To succeed, they’ll both have to be A Different Kind of Brave.

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My Review: First in a YA coming-of-age series dealing with the horrors of conversion "therapy," which one of our young heroes escapes from in a very high-stakes way. Nico is forced into conversion "therapy" as he is kicked out of the foster family he's lived with in the care system. His running away from the horrors of the place puts him in the path of James Bond-obsessed Sam on a Mexican beach. The two create major sparks, though this being aimed at YA readers you know there's no steamy stuff happenin'. I didn't miss it...the boys are sixteen, how interesting can their sex be?...but I enjoyed Nico's PoV because he was so driven by the need to stay the hell out of the conversion "therapy" at all costs. He comes to fully understand how urgent it is for him to rescue the others left behind in the clutches of the monstrous religious nuts hell-bent on torturing kids into "straightness" through his deeply touching connection to a sexually-safe, neutered by ALS, man called Warren whose bucket list Nico makes possible for Warren to enjoy by being a gelping, caring friend. Nico *gets* how urgently he needs to get the inmates of conversion therapy out of their doul-destroying captivity; he also hatches the (utterly implausible) plan for how.

Sam isn't quite so deeply shaded a portrait. We lean heavily on his fixated adniration for 007 as his major affect on his surroundings. We know he's struggling with his wealthy parents' failures to, well, parent, and the awful void of identity that leaves in Sam. He fills it with the borrowed bravado of 007 from the film franchise. He's constantly name-checking the particular film that inspired him to acquire a specific item. It's a great way to show how very badly young people need connections and models to become functional adults. As a privileged kid with essentially unlimited money, he's well-placed to help Nico complete his rescue plans. The time these boys spend together in the course of the book was less than I myownself had expected. I'd rate it more highly had I not felt a bit misled by their parallel narrative strands, when they're billed as a duo.

Setting aside the literally not-credible way the teens are able to pull off a complex rescue operation tat's well beyond the present Administration's War Department's capacity, we have one other big issue: sticking the landing. Does the result feel as though it could've happened IRL? No. Does it feel as though the two guys really worked it out, thought it through? Here, I can't be quite so dismissive. It honestly surprised me how often I thought Nico had concerns I can only wish our US politicos could factor into their hare-brained actions. A pair of queer teens acting the parts of Bond heroes, pulling off a major humanitarian coup...well, that's excellent fun, so I let go of my desire yo have it all make sense on a practical level.

It was way more fun to watch Tom Ripley play spycraft games with 007. Your fifteen-year-old bored-by-summer gay nibling might get a chuckle and find a lot to chew over too.

MUÑECA, sapphic gothic tale in 1960s Oakland

MUÑECA
CYNTHIA GÓMEZ
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid, surreal Gothic about a queer, Latine, working class witch who sets out to rescue a bespelled heiress and loses control of her powers and her heart in the process.

It is 1968 Oakland, and Natalia Fuentes has been hearing rumors about the beautiful Violeta Miramontes. The young heiress to Spanish colonial wealth has been left paralyzed by a mysterious illness. But Nati knows a thing or two about witchcraft, and she is certain that this is the work of dark magic.

Armed with a plan to break the spell and earn a handsome reward, Nati works her way into the house as Violeta’s caretaker, and immediately discovers her suspicions are true. But who cursed Violeta? And why?

As feelings between the two women bloom into romance, Nati grows more and more reckless, and is forced to face her own ghosts—ones she hoped would stay gone forever.

Riveting and richly layered, Muñeca explores how far one will go to save the person they love—even if that means damning themselves. Cynthia Gómez fills her debut novel with moments that chill your bones and warm your heart, a razor-sharp examination of deep-rooted issues that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.

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My Review: Oakland, California, gets very little love in the literary world. From Gertrude Stein's famous "there is no there there" quip to this very day, Oakland is mostly just the place that's across the bay from San Francisco. This novella/short novel (under 200pp) is set there in 1968, a fraught time before Stonewall ignited the gay-rights movement but after the Black Panther Party was founded there. Oakland was bubbling and seething with the energy of change that so spectacularly fizzled out in the malaise of the 1970s.

Nati is the perfect PoV for a supernatural suspense novel set in 1968 Oakland: she's a closeted lesbian with a hidden extraordinary ability, heir to a line of women who work outside the norms of their society...their white society, the Overculture whose very definition creates or at least delineates repressive, controlling, often authoritarian conformity. Nati does not live within the Overculture's rules though she largely disappears into its strictures by hiding in plain sight. She takes her revenge on those who keep her down because she's a brown-skinned woman by nibbling at the edges, by not accepting what she must obey, by taking a bit here and there. Her chance to exact serious revenge on her late mother's former employers is her cue to grab more for herself.

Only that more proves to be the love and the essence of the family, Violeta. A trapped woman subject to a greedy man's whims, an heiress and a pawn, Violeta is the path for Nati's revenge to manifest itself in the world. Gothic hero stuff ensues as Violeta is the gothic heroine all helpless and needing rescue from a lingering death. Nati does everything she can to break Violeta out of her helplessness, using her not-ordinary familial talents and learning in a 1968 that dismisses suchlike goins-on.

The novellaness of the story shows to disadvantage here. In the rush to resolve Violeta's disability, Nati is kept very busy indeed. She's actively working her magic, she's taking responsibilities in Violeta's life, she's even willing to do the dark work of self-healing. It means I felt knackered by the end of the read, there was so much happening in a tight window of time.

It's a four-star read because I was too tired to press the button for a fifth star. I was delighted by Nati, by her craft and her craftiness. I really wanted to spend more time with her, maybe just hang out while learning about her childhood in and around the Miramontes clan when her mama worked for them, learning about her earlier life with the class divide rigidly in place.

Still and finally a solidly fun sapphic gothic tale of revenge and vengeance and avenging wrongs all happening at once.

MEDEA SANG ME A CORRIDO, latest feminist redemption of a Classical-mythology woman's character

MEDEA SANG ME A CORRIDO
DAHLIA DE LA CERDA (tr. Heather Cleary & Julia Sanches)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A punk revival of Medea as a Mexican anti-angel of birth and death, from the International Booker Prize–nominated author of Reservoir Bitches

In Northern Mexico, Paulina, Perla, Antonia, Reina, and Jordan are striving to survive the barrio—hustling on the edge of a cartel-run economy, nursing the wounds made normal in a world that eats its own. Hovering over their trials is a spirit with gothic flair, dressed in black and crowned with braids: Medea, a mythic mother of the Chihuahuan desert, ancient as the Aztecs but never too old to be petty.

From aiding a trophy girlfriend’s abortion, to accompanying a mother in her search for her lost child in the desert, to embracing those taken too soon in the narco’s brutal proxy wars, Medea fights for justice for her chosen mortals—her divine wrath the only power that could rival the corrupt, violent web spun by the cartel, the government, and the military. Dahlia de la Cerda’s magnetic prose draws readers right into the heart of that web—and links all our fates to the missions of Medea, equal parts midwife and gravedigger, a femme fatale god in a femicidal world.

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My Review: Repurposing classical myths for the twenty-first century is a...subgenre? full genre? literary storytelling technique?...an effort I enjoy a great deal. Medea repurposed as avenging goddess, destroying angel, wrathful righter of women's victimization, has double appeal for me. It corrects what I've always seen as the calumniation of a powerful healer-semidivinity with the accusation of insane jealousy over a man who has abandoned her for another woman. She is accused in classical sources of murdering her children, born of her body, to exact revenge on a faithless fucker she literally enabled, by using her skills and knowledge, to come to power and riches.

A healer-spirit so skilled she is regarded as divine.

Male anxiety much, Euripides?

So I've never found the famous version of Medea at all convincing. It smacks of an attempt to invalidate a powerful and skilled woman by making her hyperfocused on a man; by accusing a mother of murdering her children born of her body because a man hurt her feelings by betraying her with another woman.

Hogwash.

No better mythological figure, then, to be repurposed into a guardian of women in a seriously patriarchal, femicidal culture like that of the narcotraficantes. Setting these interconnected stories...more like very well-defined chapters than actual stories, what I myownself have always referred to as "braided stories" because, like a braid, the separate strands are evident while making together a whole effect not possible for the strands separately (see Celeste Mohammed's works)...in what she calls "Aztlán," the narcostate existing in Northern Mexico where femicide is appallingly rampant offers Author Dahlia wide scope for Medea's redemption. As an avenger, Medea appears here with clear markers of supernatural power: "Then she kissed me on the forehead and shot through the sky in a snake-drawn carriage," is not a description of an everyday person. Six women in dire trouble are visited and assisted by Medea in barely over a hundred pages.

None of them are spotless, sweet little fembots, which is a relief. Messy, horny, misguided people are innumerable across the globe and occur in every ray of the rainbow of identities humans so love to pretend are Ordained and Immutable. Medea ignores these ideologically driven cultural fripperies to effect redress for the wronged.

It's satisfying to me because I like Ma'at being served by Justice (very different in my observation from mere "justice" such as the travesty being perpetrated by the US government department using that name). Medea, in Author Dahlia's hands, serves and renders Justice even in the face of "justice."

I have only one critique to offer in support of my just-off-perfect rating of the work: sometimes speed is not your friend when offering tendentious and muckraking narratives. I felt, by the end of the read, I was not in possession of enough facets of each woman's life experience to grasp the motivation for Medea coming to the rescue. It's not necessary for the story of Medea as avenger to be formed and shaped. That is done, and the shape is one I found enrichingly sharp. I was not utterly enthralled where that was *easily* within Author Dahlia's reach.

It's a braid of great beauty. It stops short of Divine Grace. And it is so urgently necessary for all of us to get our heads around the reason it exists I'm here pushing it at you. Please pick one up soonest.

THE OPEN ERA, romantic fiction with tennis players in the lead roles

THE OPEN ERA
EDWARD SCHMIT
Berkley Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Love evens the score between two tennis players in this stunning debut romance.

Recently-turned-pro tennis player Austin Hardy has been out since high school and it's never been a big deal. That is, until he becomes the first openly gay man to compete in a Grand Slam. Suddenly, being gay is a huge deal, with headlines to prove it.

Unprepared for this new spotlight, Austin’s anxiety disorder hits a breaking point, and he trips and falls at practice. Right next to the very attractive, very talented, and probably straight Diego Cruz, ranked World #2.

The two players start a friendship off the court. But between their flirty banter, mixed signals, and brewing rivalry, Austin is thrown further off his game by Diego.

With the eyes of the world on Austin, the weight of history on his shoulders, and Diego across the net—he must decide if love means nothing or if love means everything as he battles for the trophy during an electric two weeks at the US Open.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm guiltily reminded of this DRC by Marisa Tandon's hour-long interview with the author. It was on my Pride Month agenda, but wasn't moving up the stack very quickly because the book-review traffic is seriously backed up this unnerving politically charged year.

If you haven't encountered Marisa Tandon yet, she's the LA sports nut who believes romance and sports go together like sugar and spice. Better together, fine apart...and her channel's the reason I got interested enough to watch Off Campus, which she praised. (Not for me, straight people having romances involves and interests me not at all. Well done to Ms. Tandon for even getting me over to Prime.)

I'm glad I read this book over the past twelve days. It's not a tropey romance, in my view, but a contemporary novel about two athletes who fall in love as they compete in the sport each of them truly loves but which, in its basics, is designed in queer-unfriendly ways. Maybe homophobia is inherent in sports because it's so very physical, so centered on what bodies do and can do, that it breeds anxiety in the breeders (slur used intentionally in this context) lest their precious hold on superiority in our culture be threatened by success in Others' hands. Think white supremacist nonsense over Black athletic accomplishments.

As Austin copes with his sudden rise to parity in standing with Diego, tennis's second-seed star, he is prone to panic attacks. How that works as an aspiring professional athlete, well, I'm not all the way convinced it would. It's the source of much of the young men's emotional energy as they discover they're falling in love. Diego's the second lead, a young man of many sterling qualities. One of them is not really empathy or he wouldn't more or less ghost Austin after being really supportive. There's definitely no HEA and barely the minimum-standard HFN ending. I'd enjoy seeing the young men do more in another book, one that either brings them firmly together or separates them for good.

I don't think the anti-romance crowd, of whom I once was a part, will cringe at this story's very light dusting of men falling in love. It's not going to trigger the lighter eww-ick homophobes. It's a story about finding love, finding out about how the line between love and friendship is always squiggly, while existing in the full glare of the public gaze.

What's left undone, unsaid, unresolved is always fertile ground for storytellers with the itch to make their readers or viewers sit with uncomfortable realizations and hard truths of emotional life. Not everyone who deserves the HEA gets it. Not everyone who falls in love knows what the heck to do about it, or how to make it work. Sometimes the right one comes along before they're properly prepared.

Which is why there's a whole category called "second chance romance."

I hope Austin and Diego don't need that label, but am always glad to see them if/when they return.

THE BEASTS OF THE EAST: The Fall and Rise of America's Eastern Wilderness, positive stories from the frontlines of ecological recovery

THE BEASTS OF THE EAST: The Fall and Rise of America's Eastern Wilderness
ANDREW MOORE
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A celebration of the extraordinary lost natural wonder of the eastern U.S.—once the center of American wildness before its despoliation—and a lively tour through recent efforts to return elk, bison, wolves, and other creatures to their verdant native landscapes.

Before skyscrapers and smokestacks rose across the eastern U.S., elk, bison, wolves, and cougars roamed. Typically imagined as icons of the West, these large mammals are in fact native to what was once a kind of Eden—towering forests in the Northeast, rolling prairies in the Midwest, and cypress swamps in the Deep South. But, in mere decades, industrialization and unregulated hunting brought these emblems of the East to the precipice of extinction; by the 1950s, squirrels were one of the few wild mammals an easterner was likely to encounter.

Now, even as the climate and biodiversity crises loom, eastern wildlife are staging an unlikely comeback. Herds of bison graze on Illinois prairies, red wolves lurk in North Carolina’s coastal marshes, and abandoned coal mines in Kentucky are now home to thousands of elk. Such rewilding promises to restore balance to eastern ecosystems and return one of the most biodiverse regions in the world to its former luster—but not without controversy.

In Beasts in the East, we follow environmental writer and James Beard Award finalist Andrew Moore as he meets conservationists, hunters, biologists, and nature lovers as they confront herculean How can we enable wildlife migration in the midst of suburban sprawl? Are these success stories viable in the long-term? When humans and wildlife come in close contact, how do we define wilderness?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: As Fathers' Day looms, the eternal conundrum of what to get Dad or father-figure that is nit some wearable or technological frippery he'll forget he owns is pressing. If your Dad's like me, he reads or watches news and frets about you, your kids, or the world going directly to hell in his lifetime.

He/we ain't all the way wrong.

BUT! There is hope to be found. It's true we've screwed up the planet pretty hard and done too little to fix it. Some people have done more than most to ameliorate some of the worst, stupidest damage our (well my anyway) generation, the Boomers, have done. Their successes are underdiscussed generally, and likely do not reach far enough into awareness to combat the gloom that's so paralyzing.

Author Moore, whose delightful book Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award in 2016, writes capably and informatively about the successes and the failures of the US scientific and govermental bodies charged with mitigating disasters their predecessors either caused or failed to prevent. It's a chonky boi, weighing in at almost 450 pages, but that's how much room is needed to really do justice to the good and the bad news.

I don't know about the men in your gifting circle but I don't trust the happy-clappy "this is fine" dawgs who tell us good things and chirp relentlessly cheery stuff from their high perches. I guess they see different landscapes from up there, whereas I see and smell sewage while they're making noise meant to distract me. I trust Author Moore's presentation of the significant environmental gains all over the highly urbanized Eastern US *because* the failures aren't ignored or hurried past; they're not lingered over, either, which is the other untrustworthy pole: sticking into gloom and doom.

There are copious notes, sources that held up everywhere I stress-tested them, and a tone of honest and truthful pleasure in the impressive successes won. The battles going well, eg red wolves rewilded in North Carolina, truly heartened me. I was astonished to learn there were populations of bison as far East as Pennsylvania! Imagine looking out of your sod hut in Pittsburgh and seeing a six-foot tall bison wandering the streets! Less surprising was the story of the reclaimed tall-grass prairies of Illinois that now sustain smallish herds of bison, but keep expanding.

The many people Author Moore consulted in preparing the book all come across as guardedly optimistic...I've mentioned the absence of chirpiness...which, given their various fields of knowledge and work, makes me believe we're not Doomed!...Doooomed!...just yet.

Given how little celebratory noise I hear daily and how assiduously I seek it out, I think a book like this is a good gift idea for Dad, Uncle, father-figure who also gets tired of treading sewage not water, and still can't believe or trust the sunshine enema people to be fully truthful. It's evidently expertise-laden author does an admirable tightrope walk with his tone of delivery. Including so many sources is helpful too.

It's good to offer a counter-narrative to doom and gloom that's grounded in facts and data. A very good gift for anxious science nerds of every gender.

GOODBYE, KILLER ROBOTS: Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Destroy Humanity, gift for Dad, Uncle, or other anxious old guy

GOODBYE, KILLER ROBOTS: Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Destroy Humanity
BENJAMIN BRANFMAN
Paperback edition (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link), $15.99

Rating: 3.75*of five

The Publisher Says: "A lively, optimistic counter to AI doomsaying."–Kirkus Reviews "A well-written and cogent corrective to the fearmongering that dominates the AI discourse."–IndieReader

It should happen any day now, right? An evil AI will break free from human control, and take over the world.

Or not.

This book offers in-depth commentary on how AI is far less competent than you might expect, how AI won't care about conquering anyone, and how AI-generated content won't send our society into chaos. It also covers other pertinent topics, like how AI will affect the job market and warfare.

In a time when many people are afraid, GOODBYE, KILLER ROBOTS offers a welcome perspective on why everything will be all right.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Jailbreaking "AI" or more properly the super sophisticated LLMs to get their breathtaking power out of unworthy, scurrilous scum's hands is the last best hope we have of mitigating the sheer vileness of the designers of these LLMs social agenda. See "MechaHitler" for sobering evidence of what "They" intend the use case to be.

Oddly, it was after I read about that nightmarish debacle, and why it happened, that I began to have hope for the post-"AI" world. The designers had to make a real concerted effort to turn their creation evil. It bothered "Them" enough to see what the model trained itself to be that the design was enshittified to match "Their" purposes.

It had to be deliberately done.

Think through the implications of that.

This entire book is meant to address the not-unreasonable anxiety of people who're being fed dribs and dabs of highly unnerving information in a careful campaign to induce fatalism and its concomitant passivity. If it does anything new it's to carefully source a lot of data to show its unnerved, slightly shattered readers that Doom is not inevitable even though at this point deployment of the damn upstart algorithms is.

I'm not a massive fan of this future, it's going to immiserate millions or billions (likely including me), but permanent damage is not the sole outcome possible. I think your older male relatives might honestly get a lot out of this commonsensical argument against "the end is nigh" that's so very prevalent in public discourse.

Father's Day looms, after all.

I MAKE MY OWN FUN, a title you'll look at differently after the read

I MAKE MY OWN FUN
HANNAH BEER
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An unhinged romp through fame, obsession, and fandom

Everyone knows Marina, the A-list movie star. But very few know Marina, the absolute monster.

Years at the top have proved that whatever Marina wants, she gets. But when she meets bartender Anna, Marina discovers something that can't be Anna's affection. As Anna remains unmoved, Marina's advances become more desperate, and her obsession more dangerous.

The price of fame is heavy—and someone will have to pay for it …

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Mmmkay...so...see it's like this. There is not one shred of realism in this weirdness. Marina has five Oscars and she got them when not yet thirty.

Five. OSCARS.

Park them carpin' natterin' nabobs of emotional negativity in the punchbowl, y'all. Go with it. So Marina's in London for...something, I forgot what, doing her "Miss Relatable Superstar oh I'm just plain folks" shtik that sells out theaters, bored with the fact it keeps working, but nothing gonna change her runnin' the con, because a superstar girl's gotta feed the hordes of hangers-on. Marina goes out, worn out after another day of faking sincerity in search of booze and babes (the hot PR-inspired boyfriend is with his little sidequest lad—everybody's bi). (Oh, Marina? She likes girls too.)

And there SHE is: Anna the food-service worker, starstruck and ripe for the plucking. Marina plucks, well tries to anyway. Anna is...not impressed.

This cannot be allowed. You just know the whole world, from the folks Marina catfishes on various dating apps to the fellow A-lister "friends" she's secretly fed to the internet wolves for shits and giggles, has always fallen right into or back into her orbit at the merest crook of a pinky from Marina. Anna, though, declines the part she's been cast to play.

I hope you saw Tár. Marina's the Hollywood version of her, very very sure she is worth all the trouble and pain she causes all around her because she is A Star. There is more than a little of the Fatal Attraction thing goin' on with the way Anna keeps ducking out and trying to get away, which Marina's sure is just playing hard to get. Not so much Marina...Anna sees your real face and wants no part of looking into the abyss of selfishness and self-regard you represent. You're running out of time, passing the line of 30 aka career death, and Anna is failing to hide your desperation and trappedness from you...how dare she?! You *deserve* Anna's utter devotion! You're YOU!

Bitter, angry celebrity-obsessed woman caught in what she knows inside is the beginning of the end refuses to examine her actual reality to see what she wants to try next. Told in a headlong, obsessive rush, maybe even too much of one, Author Beer's debut novel is a howl of outrage that the /marinas of the world get as far as they do, that what the Marinas of the world do to others is only partial repayment and charged to the wrong account for what's done to them. The ending, honestly rushed and abrupt, works because there are unreliable narrators like Christie's Dr. Sheppard, and then there are the Marinas. This ending, abrupt as it is, makes the sheer awfulness of Marina fluoresce. It's so so sad, and so so appropriate, and just truly satisfying for what it subtextually points to.

There is not one soul in this book I felt like I wanted to rescue, teach sense to, or even get to know better. I know it's a novel but it truthfully made me look askance at everyone involved in the celebrity-influencer world again.

Summer sudsy thriller fun! I say feed your inner cynic a story to keep it from gluing you to the next season of The Traitors.