Oh HELL yeah. This book has everything I love: Gatsby-soaked opulence; uber-fucked-up main characters; pretentious writerly nerds spouting existential nonsense; boys in tweed. And, of course, MOYDAH! I won't be forgetting those scenes anytime soon. Oh Rex, there was no way you were getting outta this one alive.
Highly recommended for fellow Tartt / Secret History fans. ( )

I had fun reading this but I wouldn't recommend it--just feels like there are other books doing this better.

Hmmm - this suspense novel got better as it went along, but I'm still stuck between a 3.5 and a 4 rating. It's a familiar tale - like the movie Single White Female, a woman of few resources tries to become her wealthier and prettier rival - but updated for this era, because cell phones and texts have an outsized influence on the plot. Louise, from a working class New Hampshire family, is struggling to stay on top of her expenses and is working three jobs when she is hired by the very wealthy Lavinia and sucked into her adventurous Manhattan orbit. Lavinia habitually uses and discards young female sycophants, and all Louise wants it to stay in her good graces and at her gorgeous townhouse. Both women have been neglected by their families and are the children of hypo-critical mothers, and they're both thin, blonde, and good-looking, so the bonding seems to work well for both, until it doesn't. It turns out that neither has a conscience and both are pathological liars - so much for reliable narrators. The conclusion is surprisingly unpredictable, and that is the novel's strength. ( )

This book has gotten a ton of press and advance raves. I don't know how, because I was singularly unimpressed. First, if you trumpet all over the jacket that it's an updated Ripley, thanks, you spoiled the plot. Next, the characters. I enjoy unlikeable characters. Burton has committed a bigger sin: hers are boring and tiresome. I could not muster a shit to give. For a book of under 300 pages, the plotting feels slow. You work out pretty quickly that Louise lacks self esteem as well as money, and that Lavinia is drawn entirely from a cross of Rich Party Girl with a tired stereotype of a woman with borderline personality disorder. There's not much more to them. Their grand toxic friendship is mainly a spiral of parties and money that really doesn't need over a hundred pages to describe. The writing consists of stream of consciousness run on sentences, which while they accurately replicate the speech of this type of vapidity, become tiresome to read.

I could give it an extra half a star because I did finish it, but I regret purchasing it. Patricia Highsmith did it first, she did it better, and I remain unconvinced that this book needs to exist. ( )

UGH. I can't believe the NYT pointed me to this. ( )