This is a pleasing little Covid-era novella. I hadn’t realized when I saw it at the library that this book was “the second in a series of stories” that Eggers is planning to eventually combine into a larger work, but that doesn’t really matter: it feels like a standalone thing, though now I’m curious to read the first one as well.<\/p>\n
The book opens with Helen, a 31-year-old graphic designer whose specialty is “event invitations of the high-end category”, pondering her Uncle Peter, who is 61 and has come back to California after decades in London. Peter, we learn, who is “known as a wild card, a character, a piece of work,” now lives in Helen’s garage; he’d been a set painter in London but spent his savings since he was out of work when theaters shut down for Covid. Peter is social; Helen is generally not; Peter tells her she’s alone too much, and says they should go to one of the events she designed the invites for. Not a wedding, but maybe a fundraising gala. Helen is worried about getting caught and getting in trouble, but Peter talks her into going to a costume party at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and events ensue from there.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to say a ton about the book’s plot, but: I like the descriptions of the party at the aquarium (and, spoiler alert, the other parties that Peter and Helen crash) a lot, and I also like the way the novel ends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a pleasing little Covid-era novella. I hadn’t realized when I saw it at the library that this book was “the second in a series of stories” that Eggers is planning to eventually combine into a larger work, but that doesn’t really matter: it feels like a standalone thing, though now I’m curious to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}