Author: Gar Anthony Haywood
Publisher: Brash Books
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
This novel is an oddity at least in that the cover credits it to Gar Anthony Haywood, whereas the copyright page credits it to Dallas Murphy. Hopefully that's just because the author chose an unusual pseudonym for some reason, and not because of Murphy's law! It had a prologue which I skipped as I do all prologues. If the author doesn't think it's worth putting right there in chapter one, I don't think it's worth reading, and I've never regretted skipping a prologue.
This is set in Tinseltown, where some people are trying to cast a movie titled "Trouble Town" and the whole chapter obsesses over Brad Pitt, whom I am sure realizes that 'thusly' isn't a word. There's a difference in putting a non-word into a character's mouth and putting it into the narrative text as it appeared here. You can even get away with it in the narrative if it's a first person PoV novel, but this isn't.
Needless to say, I hope, this was the start to a novel I DNF'd in short order because I quickly realized that it was not remotely interesting to me. It was rambling and full of tedious (to me) detail that did nothing to move the story and everything to irritate and annoy me. Life is too short to spend on novels which fail to grab you from the go, so I cannot green light this project.
