When I was 17 I got my first weekend job – I was a waitress. Luckily the restaurant I worked in was nothing like as claustrophobic as the one Tess works in in this book.
Tess is 22 and newly arrived in New York, like me she read English Literature at uni but unlike me she’s not really a city girl.
She gets sucked in to the swirl of drinking, drug taking, bickering and family meals of the restaurant, and even more so into the lives of Simone and Jake.
The writing is fluid, like quicksilver, Tess is a unreliable narrator, my favourite kind, filtering everything through her own self-interest.
I really enjoyed this book, Danler’s first, and look forward to seeing what she does next.
