Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Kemp's energetic debut, a young woman embarks on a quest to become the "best girlfriend of all time." Reality Kahn, a 23-year-old from Upstate New York with a "come-hither attitude," lives in Brooklyn with two roommates. To reach her goal, she must first extricate herself from a situationship with a weed dealer. She then becomes an enthusiastic reader of Girlfriend Weekly, a magazine that advises her to seek attention from men with "boyish charm and searing intellects." She soon meets "sad-eyed" graduate student Ariel, who grudgingly agrees to become her boyfriend in exchange for the right to demand sexual favors from her, often in the cramped apartment he shares with several college friends that doubles as a music venue. Kemp blends a realistic punk rock battle of the sexes with bizarro interludes, as Reality joins a trial for a drug called ZZZZvx ULTRA, which causes her to speak and act submissively to maintain Ariel's approval. The plot is a bit thin, but the inventive conceit yields plenty of humor and incisive commentary. This funhouse portrait of the Brooklyn dating scene feels all too real. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Simon Rich meets Sarah Silverman in this raunchy and farcical debut novel about one young woman's epic quest for a boyfriend. Narrator Reality Kahn, a 23-year-old Brooklynite, earns a living by starring in water park commercials ("I had that Hollywood thing"). After Reality's casual-sex buddy suggests that she get a boyfriend, she becomes consumed by the idea and sets out to find a guy so she can be "the greatest girlfriend of all time." At a party in Gowanus, she sees boyfriend material in Ariel Koffman, a crack-smoking New York University doctoral candidate who rescues her after she accidentally locks herself in the bathroom. Three months into their relationship, Ariel dodges Reality's question about whether he considers himself her boyfriend, but she's undeterred: "He would see in due time that this love was true and that our boyfriend-girlfriend destiny was a factual thing." Throughout the novel, which contains graphic sex scenes and is periodically interrupted by experimental interludes, Reality has the man-crazed thoughts of a woman for whom the feminist movement and/or steady oxygen flow to the brain never happened. (As someone asks Ariel about Reality, "Is she of, ah, how do you say in English? Very idiotic? She has been kicked in the head by a horse?") Reality's lack of self-awareness seems to be a comment on the havoc wreaked on an online generation endlessly fed content designed to erode confidence and critical-thinking skills, especially in women (Reality reliably consults her favorite magazine,Girlfriend Weekly). The novel has some genuinely funny moments, but even fans of social satire may find Reality's shtick tiresome, and for some readers, being expected to care about the fate of a charmless and irredeemably self-absorbed character may be a Brooklyn Bridge too far. Bawdy, occasionally hilarious, and an acquired taste for sure. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
