Pretty Things – Janelle Brown

 *Spoilers

Sometimes, when you read a lot of stylish, women’s page-turner thrillers, or fiction in general, you wonder, how did this author get a book deal?  In Janelle Brown’s Pretty Things, the settings and the characters are solid. The description of an art history major grift and influencer culture, respectively, is, as intended, both sad and hilarious. She hits her marks including, admirably, the broken US Healthcare system.

If there’s a real culprit, it’s the modern affliction of a lack of editing.  If this book were workshopped, she would have been told to cut much of the background of the two main characters, who are headed on a manufactured collision course:  Nina, the grifter, calculating in the shadow of privilege, and Vanessa, the suffering Old Money Airhead Insta Heiress. Much of the beginning of this book would be considered background writing.

Fortunately, the background of the characters is interesting. The dangerous Venn diagram of who Nina is, with her boyfriend in tow, comes to life when she air rents the cottage of Vanessa’s inherited manse in Tahoe. As with many of these thrillers, a simple background check would have revealed Nina’s identity, but the author uses “too-easy-to-just-look-someone-up-on-the-internet” as a hook.  For some strange reason, Vanessa has everything in life except for the obligatory personal assistant.  

We’ll see what Nicole Kidman does with the adaptation.  The bumbling fight between Vanessa, with her Princeton Drop-Out skill set, and the déclassé con artists should be a comic thrill to watch, as portrayed in the book.