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rosseroo's review
2.0
Unless you're really really into lurid, pulpy tales of desperate people, there's little reason to spend the few hours it takes to read this book. About 90% of it takes place in Miami's South Beach, at a squalid long-term motel and the various nearby bars and restaurants. Julie is a some kind of unspecified failure 20something who's desperate to prove she's someone by becoming a writer -- without seeming to have considered that she can't actually write.
Fortunately, her next door neighbor Rennie is a spectacularly charismatic prostitute, who isn't fully selfish, but definitely lacks any hint of a care for consequences. Eavesdropping on Rennie's antics proves to be far more fodder for her laptop than anything from her imagination -- but it also leads Julie to become entangled with her. Meanwhile, a professor of poetry (and client) is obsessed with Rennie to the extent that he risks destroying his family. And then there's Rennie's business partner/boy toy, Francisco, who does some minor drug business when he's not in bed with her.
I suppose some readers might be drawn to Rennie as an embodiment of #yolo, but she's such a fantasy figure that I found it hard to see her as anything more than cartoony. Julie and Richard are the kind of pathetic drips that always crop up in these kinds of stories, neither is remotely interesting. The biggest problem is that even though there's plenty of explicit sex, and a good deal of blood, the story kind of loses momentum two-thirds of the way through, right when it should be picking up steam.
It ultimately kind of stumbles across the finish line in a series of misunderstandings and pratfalls that are more laugh-out-loud ridiculous than deadly serious. To wit, this is a book whose climax (no pun intended) includes someone hiding in a kind of S&M restraint box getting stabbed to death by a Japanese sword. And did I mention there's an albino boa constrictor?
Fortunately, her next door neighbor Rennie is a spectacularly charismatic prostitute, who isn't fully selfish, but definitely lacks any hint of a care for consequences. Eavesdropping on Rennie's antics proves to be far more fodder for her laptop than anything from her imagination -- but it also leads Julie to become entangled with her. Meanwhile, a professor of poetry (and client) is obsessed with Rennie to the extent that he risks destroying his family. And then there's Rennie's business partner/boy toy, Francisco, who does some minor drug business when he's not in bed with her.
I suppose some readers might be drawn to Rennie as an embodiment of #yolo, but she's such a fantasy figure that I found it hard to see her as anything more than cartoony. Julie and Richard are the kind of pathetic drips that always crop up in these kinds of stories, neither is remotely interesting. The biggest problem is that even though there's plenty of explicit sex, and a good deal of blood, the story kind of loses momentum two-thirds of the way through, right when it should be picking up steam.
It ultimately kind of stumbles across the finish line in a series of misunderstandings and pratfalls that are more laugh-out-loud ridiculous than deadly serious. To wit, this is a book whose climax (no pun intended) includes someone hiding in a kind of S&M restraint box getting stabbed to death by a Japanese sword. And did I mention there's an albino boa constrictor?
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