Kate Gale

I wanted to like this book. Set during the pandemic, an intelligent but down-on-her-luck girl lives in her car, cleans houses and tutors kids to put herself through college. What's not to like? Well, it just didn't feel authentic. It felt derivative of the authentic memoir Maid, for one thing. And the conversations she and her friends kept having, over and over, stereotyping rich people and white people as though they're all the same, just as one of those rich people refers to those friends as "you people" - it got very tedious and not believable. Real people, even the downtrodden, just don't talk like that. And those times when she lived in her car for several days: how come her phone still worked? Did she have to run her car to charge it and to power the rice cooker?
It was an advance reader copy (thank you!), so I hope the grammatical errors get fixed before publication. And not to pile on, but I hope future novels by Gale, a poet, will be written more poetically.… (mais)

My opinions and impressions of this book left me conflicted. On one hand, I loved the story. It was creative, unique, and felt authentic. Some topics felt flippant and blindsided, like her family history. Some moments felt extremely sincere and even poetic. Ok, here's what threw me: the dialogue. It was disjointed, like a run-on sentence, difficult to follow who was speaking, and felt amateur. Instead of Point A talking to Point B, it felt like the conversation veered somewhere off the side. The sentences didn't respond exactly to each other. Is this how the character speaks? By sidestepping and not responding directly to what someone says? I'm unsure. I kept questioning if this could be intentional. It was very distracting. There were also some moments where the main character had absolutely no reaction to the weird things people said to her, and sometimes she acted out inconsistently. Is this purposeful? Again, I have no idea. In all, I enjoyed the book. I wonder how it would feel different if those things were changed.… (mais)

I liked the premise of this book contrasting the differences in the life, and in some instances, the morals of the reasonably rich in the city of Los Angeles, and the poorer workers who came to take care of their houses and their children, but it felt like the author kept intruding into the story with comments to make sure we understood her point of view, as if we might miss it from the story line. I finally quit trying to follow which houses the workers were cleaning as they all felt about the same with drugs and sex and Fox news being the main themes. I think there could be a good story in there,and with the help of a good editor I believe the author definitely as something important to say.… (mais)