Mini-Reviews: Bring On The Fluff!

I recently had my first DNF of 2025, a suspense novel featuring vile, hateful characters and y'all I just couldn't even. What's a girl to do? Well this girl decided to dive head first into a pile of cotton candy fluff and it was just what the doctor ordered.

Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up by Alexandra Potter was the inspiration for a short-lived American sitcom, Not Yet Dead, that lasted two seasons. I never watched the show, but based on the synopsis of it I'm fairly confident in saying it diverges wildly from the book - other than some of the characters sharing the same names and the obituary writing job thing. 

Nell is on the other side of forty and her life has imploded. Her business (a bookstore / café) went bust right along with her engagement. She's now single, broke, and with no other option than to tuck tail and head back to London. A couple of problems with that is she has no prospect of a job, she's broke, and rents in London are through the roof. All her friends are happily married with a couple of kids meaning not only is she a fifth wheel, she can't impose on them by couch surfing until she gets her shit together. Nothing for it, she answers an ad to rent a room from a wound-tight eco-warrior wannabe who controls the thermostat like the Gestapo, borrows a little money from her parents, and tries to work her contacts to find a job. Which she does - writing obituaries. That's how she meets Cricket, an 80-something widow with her own challenges. The two become fast friends and naturally help each other heal and commiserate along the way.

I came back to the romance genre in the late 1990s through Chick Lit, and that's what this is. Chick Lit with a 40-something heroine. She wants a husband and children, and well life hasn't exactly turned out the way she's planned. Having been in the States (New York, then California) for the last several years, she's now back home to lick her wounds and has discovered life (along with her friends and family) has kept on moving along without her.

It's a very character driven read and you're inside Nell's head for the duration. If you don't find her funny and interesting from the jump, save yourself some time and DNF early. I've always been one of those readers who can find Chick Lit great fun so long as I don't consume a steady diet of it, and this book largely worked for me - but like a lot of romantic comedy stuff these days, readers should be warned there's some heavy themes underpinning the story that, even with foreshadowing, still pop out to slam the brakes on the overall fluffy mood. That said, the author does say some interesting things about the expectations placed on women by themselves and society that still stand out even with the lighter tone. I had a good time with this and it's a crackin' good listen on audiobook, which I highly recommend. 

Content warning: infertility, miscarriage

Final Grade = B+

Everybody's favorite rich girl social media influencer and part-time serial killer, Kitty Collins, is back for her second adventure in I Bet You'd Look Good in a Coffin by Katy Brent.

Poor Kitty. She really doesn't want to kill men, but they make abstinence so darn difficult! She's trying to break her social media addiction, has pretty much stopped her work as an influencer, is attending an anger management group, and settling into a blissful existence with her boyfriend Charlie. A Chick Lit version of Dexter, Kitty only ever killed men who really, really deserved to die but she's determined to be good - until a social media influencer, a misogynistically vile incel going by the name of "Blaze Bundy" starts targeting her. On top of that her vulnerable gang rape survivor friend has just declared she's fallen in love with her therapist (but it's OK since he's no longer seeing me as a patient, so why aren't you happy for us Kitty?!) and Kitty's estranged, fabulously wealthy mother is getting married to a man Kitty didn't know existed until the wedding invitation showed up in the mail.

Can you take this book seriously? Absolutely not. Kitty continues to think she's smart but bungles her way through her murder spree - and in this day and age of cell phone tracking and DNA it's a wonder the cops don't at least know she exists. But it's not that kind of book. It's a female rage book with an undercurrent of dark humor - and that's either going to work for you or not. It naturally doesn't take Kitty long to get up to her old tricks and soon her relationship with Charlie is on life support.  Be advised this does not stand alone well at all, with events from the first book playing a heavy role and the ending got a little bit "out there" even for me - the moral of the story apparently being the family that kills and covers up murders together apparently stays together.  But it all goes down like a candy-flavored cocktail even when it turns bleakly dark.  The ending isn't entirely "happy" as far as the romance goes, but the author leaves the door wide open for potential future books. It's not high art but I had a good time reading it and inhaled it in a couple of greedy gulps. Also, and this cannot be overstated - terrible, awful, asshole men getting exactly what they deserve....

Content warning: Murder, violence, attempted rape

Final Grade = B

Library Loot Review: How to Kill Men and Get Away With It

I know blogs have been "dead" for at least the last decade, but nothing will get me to pick up a book faster than a long-form blog review.  Bonus points if it's a book I didn't know existed.  It was Whiskey's review of How to Kill Men and Get Away With It by Katy Brent that caused me to immediately add myself to the wait list at the library.  

Kitty Collins is a poor little rich girl living in London.  Her father made his money in slaughterhouses and meat packing, and when Kitty saw the family business up close and personal she quickly went vegan. The family money affords her a fabulous London penthouse that her mother gave her, but otherwise she makes her living as a social media influencer and has a group of equally vacuous social media influencer "friends" - although Kitty's follower numbers outstrip them all.

She didn't set out to start killing men. The first one happened quite by accident. A drunken lout who accosts Kitty outside of a club. Seriously, it was an accident! But soon Kitty finds herself an avenging angel - taking out men who so richly deserve it (rapists, molesters, real upstanding citizens all). The cops aren't on to her - the problem is someone else is. Our Kitty has a stalker.

This book is like if Sex and the City, Dexter and the movie version of American Psycho had an unholy baby.  It strives for humor and satire but it doesn't always quite hit the mark.  Part of the problem is that for a very long time you pretty much hate everybody in this book. This could partly be a Wendy Problem. I'll admit, I find Influencer Culture largely gross and there's nothing in the first half of this book that changed my mind.  These are all vacuous, shallow people with really pathetic lives.  Can Influencers "do good?"  Sure, they can. But by and large the feeding of consumer culture and preying on peoples' insecurities makes my left eye twitch.

But there's dead bodies, and nothing will get Wendy to keep reading a book quite like dead bodies (don't judge). Things start to even out a bit once Kitty gets a love interest as it gives her character more dimension.  Although if I think about it for more than a hot second, the fact that it takes a man to give Kitty's character more dimension is a problematic development for a book trying to make the statement that this particular book is trying to make.  Also the "twists" in this story, the various "big reveals" come out of left field.  What you think you know you don't really know - and here's the problem with that...

There's no foreshadowing. Like none.  These juicy nuggets are just tossed on to the page with all the subtlety of a live hand grenade.

There's an inordinate amount of pop culture references that will age this book exponentially as the days tick by (but really, it's a book about a social media influencer so...) and somehow Kitty having her cell phone on her every time she kills someone doesn't seem to get her in trouble (Hello, GPS tracking? Pinging off cell phone towers?  But again, probably too much to expect from what this book's ultimate goal is...)

Did I like this book? Not entirely. Could I stop reading this book?  Reader, I could not.  And while Whiskey points out very valid criticisms about the latter portion of the book in her review, these issues didn't bother me quite as much.  If anything the second half worked a bit better for me than the first half - mainly because by that point I was past the live hand grenade twists and Kitty was more "in peril" than simply vacuous and blood-thirsty.

I wasn't madly in love, but I'll read Brent's next book.

Final Grade = B-