Publication Date March 24, 2024
Last year, I read and reviewed Chris Bohjalian’s The Lioness, and gave it four stars. In 2021, reviewing Hour of The Witch, I wrote “I admit it: I have been a big fan of Chris Bohjalian, ever since I read Midwives several years ago. I consider Mr. Bohjalian one of the most reliable authors I read regularly, and I always look forward to his books…Hour of the Witch (2021), Red Lotus (2020), The Flight Attendant (2018 and BTW it is WAY better than the TV series), The Sleepwalker (2016), and The Guest Room (2015) have all been 5 star reviews for me. And OMG The Sandcastle Girls was one of my all-time favorite books. So I was really looking forward to reading his latest, The Princess of Las Vegas, which I received from Doubleday Books and NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
TBH, I started this one several times, and kept setting it aside in favor of some other shiny new book that came my way…but this past weekend, I settled in and read the whole thing – once I got into it, it was GREAT! At first, it was just a story about a young woman named Crissy who left Vermont, and now lives in a casino hotel in Las Vegas where she has a residency performing her show — a tribute to Princess Diana. It felt like it wasn’t grabbing me…YET. Crissy is a complicated woman. She has a sense of humor about her life, noting “There was something dark and sad about living in n a second-rate casino, a mutable world that wobbled between the faux ostentatious and the very, very bleak.” And she knows her audience: “Most of the people who come to my show are between the ages of fifty and embalmed.” Bohjalian captures the environment perfectly, referring to “…the raucous tumult of the slot machines, and the incessant burble of conversation, laughter, and applause that is the white noise that marks a casino.” Referring to other performers at various venues in town, “They were all struggling, trying desperately to stay afloat in a business where most people drowned.” (Wow, can Bohjalian WRITE!)
Crissy’s sister Betsy arrives in Vegas, arriving with her almost-divorced boyfriend and newly adopted thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy and her boyfriend have jobs with a new crypto company that has come to town, looking to move the casino they are about to buy into operating based on crypto, and soon the whole story starts branching out into areas including crypto, mob hits, organized crime, and the fraught relationship between Crissy and Betsy. Throughout, there are so many lines that just grabbed me “…malls are the giant pandas and snow leopards of commerce. They’re going extinct.” WOW.
The story moves along at a fast clip once it gets going, and I was glued to my Kindle for the whole ride. Five stars.