A review by therivingtonreader
Maeve Fly by C.J. Leede

4.0

Maeve Fly moves to LA to live with her famous grandmother, Tallulah, after being disowned by her parents. She works at "the happiest place on Earth" as the ice princess, she loves to read, and she's obsessed with Halloween - but there is more to Maeve than what meets the eye. When she meets Gideon, her best friend's brother, her whole world changes, leaving room for Maeve to explore the darkest, and most violent, parts of herself.

Maeve Fly is weird, fucked up, and so much fun to read. It gave me everything that I wanted (but didn't get) out of American Psycho, and more. Maeve is so strange and edgy, but she's also funny and interesting. She loves LA, which at the very beginning I was a little annoyed by because it felt awkward, but as the story goes on you can tell the author has a lot of knowledge about LA, and I enjoyed reading about it as someone who has never been to the West Coast.

Maeve also doesn't have a tragic backstory to reason for her being violent, she just is, which is one of my favorite details about her:

"Men have always been permitted in fiction and in life to simply be what they are, no matter how dark or terrifying that might be. But with a woman, we expect an answer, a reason. But why would she do it? Why, why, why?"

This book is extremely graphic, with a lot of sexual content and body horror, but to me it felt like it mostly all served a purpose. We truly got to see how fucked up Maeve is, and the way she makes sense of the things she does. This book also did a great job of building up to the violence instead of just throwing it all at the reader at once. We get to understand Maeve first, and then she really lets go in the last several chapters of the book.

Thank you to Tor Nightfire for my ARC of this book!