Did not at all intend this, but somehow this is my second LA-based, relationship-focused contemporary which draws heavily on the film industry of this year. Felt a little more substantive in some respects than a lot of the non-literary contemporaries I’ve read in the last few years. I liked the characters and the relationships and the way it made use of the film industry – I realized that I sometimes quite like when books immerse me in characters who have a very different relationship to aesthetics than I do, and the main character here is a set designer and she certainly qualifies. The plot was fine. A bit ridiculous, but fine. So I liked it overall. But I also hovered on the edge of not liking it for a significant stretch of the book. Part of that was that I just wan’t in the mood to read this kind of book when I read it. But…well, I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s also because situations involving mistaken identity or hidden identity or misunderstanding or misrecognition of a particular sort, more often in tv/movies but also sometimes in books, make me profoundly uncomfortable in a way that is probably pretty idiosyncratic and weird, and for a big part of the middle of this book it felt like it might be preparing to plunge down just such a path. It didn’t, but the clear possibility got in the way of my ability to enjoy what is really a pretty light and escapist book.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.