I'm going to be honest here - I didn't really "get" this book. But it was one of this month's Kindle First book choices, and it sounded more interesting to me than the other three.
I had a number of issues while reading this book. Namely, the characters and the choice of storytelling. Let me clarify.
The characters seemed like farcical, stereotypical archetypes. What is this character's background? Let's just heap every stereotype that fits that background in this character. It felt too fake and fabricated, and I found that I struggled to even connect with any of the characters, even though I usually find at least one to connect to.
Lorelei is a 22 year old wanna be actress. Her mother, Colleen, is the crazy stage mom. Robin is her agent. Robin's husband Darren is Lorelei's half brother. Carl, Lorelei and Darren's father, seems disinterested in both his children's lives. Each character's back story is almost ridiculous.
Lorelei gets a shot to be on a reality show, but when she loses to a gorgeous black girl, Colleen goes on a drunken, racist rant...which gets filmed and goes viral. Lorelei is humiliated, ends up turning to drugs and cutting her mother out of her life.
Now, with the storytelling, I had a problem with the way it jumped around. I generally don't have a problem with a book switching through different character's perspectives, and this wasn't my problem with this book. My problem came with the decision the author made to jump around time periods. The book starts in 2013, and right off the bat, the writing implies that you should know what happened in the past of the characters, even though you don't. Then you jump to 2012, where all that back story is revealed. So suddenly it makes sense about why Lorelei isn't talking to her mom and why she's doing drugs. Then, the story jumps back to 2013 when Colleen decides to try to reconnect her shattered family on a show called Real Happy Family (basically it's like Intervention on A&E). Colleen knows Lorelei is in Reno, so the whole family goes hoping to help Lorelei with her problems.
The ending was too neat. I kind of wanted more nitty gritty of that story, but I got an ending that was tied up with a neat little bow, and I find those kinds of ending a little hard to believe.
The story was easy to get through, it had a nice pace, but I just felt a little lost at times.
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