Book Review: "The Haters" by Robyn Harding

After many years, Camryn has finally achieved her dream: her first novel has been published. She can’t believe her book will be sold online and in stores.

But Camryn’s joy is short-lived, because the night of her book launch party, she receives an email from a person she’s never heard of, insulting her and accusing her of horrible things related to the book. She can’t understand what would possess this person to do such a thing, but she tries to put it out of her mind and revel in her accomplishment.

When Camryn checks reviews for her book online, she is upset to see a one-star review, one which levels some of the same accusations she received in the email. More and more similar reviews and ones that react to the negative ones show up, and Camryn can’t understand who would want to ruin her career in this way. And when her publisher tries to intervene by getting some of the negative reviews removed, it sets off a larger firestorm.

Things continue to spiral out of control, wreaking havoc in her relationships with her boyfriend Theo, her daughter Liza, and her best friend Martha, not to mention her job as a school counselor. The attacks become more personal and more unhinged, causing Camryn to begin mistrusting everyone.

But in an effort to understand who might be behind all of this, Camryn makes misstep after misstep. She risks her relationships, her job, her publishing career—maybe even her life. How will she regain control, if at all?

I am a big Robyn Harding fan, but this book wasn’t my favorite. Everyone was a little bit crazy and weird, and Camryn didn’t strike me as particularly smart. And while I was glad the perpetrator wasn’t whom I thought it was when I started the book, I wasn’t satisfied with the resolution. But I’ll still read everything Harding writes!!

Book Review: "Best Served Hot" by Amanda Elliot

In Amanda Elliot's follow-up to Sadie on a Plate, the heat gets turned up when two restaurant critics team up.⁣

⁣ Julie loves being a restaurant reviewer on social media. She works as an executive assistant in order to support her side gig as @JulieZeeEatsNYC, and her more than 50,000 followers love her food photos and videos.

⁣ ⁣ What Julie wants more than anything is an actual job as a restaurant reviewer for a newspaper, and her dream job is to work at the New York Scroll. But when the Scroll doesn’t even contact her after receiving her application, and they hire Bennett Wright (whose mom is friends with the paper’s CEO) instead, she’s angry and hurt.⁣

⁣ While at a food festival in Central Park, Julie runs into Bennett, and their encounter devolves into Julie confronting him for his snobby attitude toward social media and those who use it for restaurant/food reviews. Her video footage of their confrontation sees her follower count jump dramatically—and it brings more traffic to Scroll's social media, too.⁣

⁣ Seeing benefit for both of them, Bennett proposes that they collaborate. They’ll both visit the same restaurants at the same time and contrast their approaches and opinions. And after some initial hijinks, they start to enjoy each other’s company, and they learn from each other.⁣ Of course, the more they collaborate, the more the chemistry intensifies. Is this a reservation for love or disaster?⁣

⁣ I love books about food and restaurants, so this was right up my alley. I loved Sadie on a Plate (and Sadie makes a cameo in this book), and this is fun, steamy, and romantic. I enjoyed the discussion about social media and the battle of print vs. internet, too.

⁣ Thanks so much to NetGalley and Berkley for the advance copy! The book publishes 2/21/2023!⁣

Book Review: "Hotels of North America" by Rick Moody

As a society, we're kind of obsessed with giving our opinions about everything—restaurants, movies, businesses, products, etc. (No, the irony is not lost on me that I'm making this comment in a book review I'm writing.)

While many of these reviews you find on sites like Yelp or Amazon (or Goodreads) can be useful, have you ever stopped to wonder what possesses people to share stream-of-consciousness ramblings that have very little relevancy to what is being reviewed? And while we're at it, have you ever been so interested in these people that you find yourself reading a lot of their reviews?

This is the concept behind Rick Moody's Hotels of North America. Presented as a compendium-of-sorts of the reviews of Reginald Edward Morse, which he posted on a fictional website called RateYourLodging.com, the book is both a commentary about one person's opinions on the declining state of many of the country's (and the world's) hotels, as well as the portrait of a man whose life is spiraling out of control, and how he chooses to handle it.

Morse started his career as an investment banker and erstwhile day trader, only to suddenly pursue a (not particularly) successful career as a motivational speaker. As his reviews unfold, we learn that he has been as unlucky in love as he has been in his career—his marriage has ended, and his short-lived affair with a "certain professor of language arts" didn't last, although he admitted to sporadic "bouts of recidivism" where she was concerned. In some of his reviews he mentions K., his companion (who also likes to be referred to by various bird names), with whom he experiences some of the worst hotel experiences, and with whom he practices a number of different cons to try and avoid paying for said hotel stays.

Hotels of North America is similar to Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members in that the reviews that comprise this book are much less about the hotels than about Morse's state of mind, although the latter book is more humorous in tone than this one is. Morse comments on everything from front desk clerks at cut-rate hotels ("The young man at the front desk looked like there was no sorrow he had not experienced") to cheese grits ("...it is not possible to consider a serving of cheese grits as falling under the rubric of grits") and Waffle House ("...it was presumed at Waffle House that you were on your last nickel, that you had squandered opportunities, that all was illusion"). He also takes the time to criticize those on RateYourLodging.com who call his veracity into question, or simply criticize his writing or make assumptions about his personal habits.

One of my favorite pieces of Morse's commentary is his thoughts on bed-and-breakfasts: "To summarize, these are the three main problems of bed-and-breakfast establishments: throw pillows, potpourri, and breakfast conversation, and the fourth problem is gazebos. And the fifth problem is water features. And the sixth problem is themed rooms, and the seventh problem is provenance (who owned the inn before and who owned the inn before that, and who owned it before that, and what year the bed-and-breakfast was built, and how old the timber is in the main hall), and the eighth problem is pride of ownership, because why can't it just be a place you stay, why does it always have to be an ideological crusade?"

The reviews are interesting, at times funny, at times poignant, but the book seems to drag on longer than it needs to. And then Moody throws himself into the story, under the guise that he had been asked to write an afterword for the compilation of Morse's reviews, only to find Morse had vanished. I felt this was an unnecessary gimmick that, while it provided some interesting commentary, didn't advance the book in any way.

This is only the second book of Moody's I've ever read, the first being The Ice Storm a number of years ago. As with that book, Hotels of North America proves his storytelling ability and his talent at satirizing suburban America and its denizens. I just wish the book was longer on substance and shorter on gimmickry.