by Nghi Vo
This was a bit of a struggle until the halfway point, but then it really started to take off for me, and by the end I was in love with it. Part of the trouble was the main character (and all the people she chooses to surround herself with) being very ambitious, closed off, and exclusively self-serving. That lasts until she meets Greta and Harry, who gradually open her up, and that's not coincidentally where the story started to burn. But then, when Jackson shows up again, we find out that burning the photos she stole from him, against the advice of the elderly dancer, was her first canonical altruistic act... so the coldness was also a story she was telling about herself?
I loved that the main character tells the story looking back on herself, and you keep expecting to meet some of the people she was deeply involved with later in her career, but no, that's actually beyond the scope of the book! Hollywood as a deep dark brutal capital-F Fairytale with unclear and yet still very dangerous rules is a very compelling argument.
PS: The sex scenes are extremely hot, which is not something I say about many sex scenes in books.