A review by wardenred
Cover Story by Susan Rigetti

challenging funny mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

The truth was that I didn’t know how to fix my life, that I wanted to throw it all away and start over again.

This was such a trip! Not a book I would normally pick up or even perhaps know about, honestly. But it was assigned to me as part of a book swap event in one of my discord servers, and it was such a nice opportunity to broaden my horizons a little. From the very start, there’s so much going on here. On the surface, there’s this simple story of a naive small-town girl trying to make it in NYC: wanting to be a writer, being happy and overwhelmed about her internship at a fashion magazine, and not knowing how to tell her family that she let her college grades drop too low and now can’t afford to register for classes. But all around the journal entries that tell this story, there are all those e-mails and transcripts and mentions of FBI investigations. So you immediately find yourself questioning everything. What is this book *actually* about? International spies? Con artists? Something even darker?

This is one of those rare cases when I didn’t vibe with any of the characters but was still majorly invested in the plot, latching onto every small new detail to try and solve the puzzle. Which is why I actually find it hard to talk about the book without dissolving into spoilers. All the things that impressed me the most are the kind that you really should experience for yourself for best effect. Like the ending. OMG, that ending! I was reading the last few chapters with this impending sense of wrongness: like, sure, things are getting wrapped up more of less nicely, but something is off, something is so off… And then, BOOM, that final twist, and suddenly so many things from earlier in the book gained a brand-new context and I realized that I’ve just read a whole different story from what I thought I was reading??? Like. Wow. So cleverly done. And to make it even better, there were all those things that I mentally filed as “small flaws,“ but looking back from the vantage point of that final revelation, the flaws are more like features.

It’s probably not going on my list of 2024 favorites because I prefer to be more engaged when it comes to the characters, but I’m definitely very happy I’ve read it and I can tell I’ll be thinking about the book’s plot a lot, mentally going through all the twists and bends!