Amy Sohn

This looked like a fun beach read. Instead, it was a disgusting, vulgar, disturbing "story" about rich snobs with no consequences for their actions and no remorse, including: drug dealing, a teacher having sex with a student, drinking while nursing and not caring, "affectionate rape" and "you want to be violated" (let's run those by rape victims and see what they think), one character who "understood why some mothers shook their babies to death" (is that supposed to be funny?), watching your show more four-year-old "humping one of the sprinklers," more racist remarks than I could count (e.g., "Becoming a single mother is like being white all your life and then waking up one morning and realizing you're black" and calling an Asian woman a "paddy whacker"), making fun of the disabled ("Cassie jerked her head violently like an epileptic"—maybe Trump took lessons in insulting people from Sohn). And then there's the actress who is indebted to the man who made her scrub his bathroom and then ejaculated on the floor she had cleaned and told her to lick it up. And what about the man who discovers the wild sex he had (while cheating on his wife) was with his daughter?

Worst of all, I felt the book was an insult to Cape Cod and particularly to Wellfleet. This book tarnishes the image of a beautiful place. (Another quote: "For someone so wealthy to come to the Cape, that took slumming too far.")

I've never thrown a book in the trash before, but that's where this one belongs. show less

What an utterly unnecessary novel.

I read this because of the "inside baseball" look at Hollywood, and that was enough to keep me reading. But oh, this book is problematic. Maddy, as a character, is basically too stupid to function. Every character seems so concerned about whether Steven is secretly gay -- and it erases everything. Maddy seems to care about infidelity only because it might be with a man, as though if Steven were cheating with a woman she doesn't care. Everything is black and show more white, straight or gay, as though there is no middle option or room for complexity. It's grating. And the ending, ugh, so saccharine it's insulting.

There's also an insultingly inaccurate pregnancy plotline with a magic "get pregnant from one single instance of unprotected sex" followed by a cringeworthy hyperemesis gravidarum plotline. I was insulted both as a woman with infertility and as a woman who had hyperemesis gravidarum. Either the author doesn't know anything about pregnancy or she wanted Maddy to be the special-est of special snowflakes, which I guess tracks with Maddy's characterization otherwise, but again, ugh. show less

I don't think it's possible to write a book with this premise -- naive young actress falls in love with Hollywood superstar -- without the reader assigning real-life correlations. That being said, there is NO WAY that this book isn't about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Not a chance. It's all so thinly veiled: her teenage obsession with him, the quick marriage, the rumors of a marriage contract, the rumors about his sexuality, the former wife who doesn't work very much anymore (Mimi show more whats-her-face), the child, the rapid divorce.

Still, that's interesting stuff. It could have been a great read except for the really poor execution. I'm fine with a third-person omniscent narrator, but I'm NOT fine with one that stays on one character 90% of the time then flits to other POVs for a paragraph or two at most. It's distracting and it makes your main character completely unreliable, especially when a lot of those POVs don't tell you anything concrete. I think the author's intention was to show many sides of the same story, but it just makes the reader doubt their understanding of all the characters, even the (uninteresting) main character.

Can you tell I've been writing Language Arts Teachers' Editions this week?

Nevertheless, I stayed up until 2 a.m. to finish the last half of the book. I still wanted to know what happened. So at least there's that. show less

I whole-heartedly disagree that Sohn offers a "fresh look at modern marriage" with this book. All the relationships are bizarrely messed up, but that's what makes the book funny. Realistic it is not, it reads like a prime-time network soap opera, but it is entertaining. Negative marks for the author's gratuitous name dropping, such a lazy way to fill pages and move the plot along. I was also taken aback by Sohn's embrace of several negative stereotypes because they did not entirely feel show more satirical. show less