Rating: ★★★★
Audience: Contemporary Fiction
Length: 368 pages
Author: Susan Rigetti
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: April 5th, 2022
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads
BOOK SUMMARY:
Netflix’s Inventing Anna and Hulu’s The Dropout meets Catch Me If You Can, a captivating novel about an ambitious young woman who gets trapped in a charismatic con artist’s scam.
After a rough year at NYU, aspiring writer Lora Ricci is thrilled to land a summer internship at ELLE magazine where she meets Cat Wolff, contributing editor and enigmatic daughter of a clean-energy mogul. Cat takes Lora under her wing, soliciting her help with side projects and encouraging her writing.
As a friendship emerges between the two women, Lora opens up to Cat about her desperate struggles and lost scholarship. Cat’s solution: Drop out of NYU and become her ghostwriter. Lora agrees and, when the internship ends, she moves into Cat’s suite at the opulent Plaza Hotel. Writing during the day and accompanying Cat to extravagant parties at night, Lora’s life quickly shifts from looming nightmare to dream-come-true. But as Lora is drawn into Cat’s glamorous lifestyle, Cat’s perfect exterior cracks, exposing an illicit, shady world.
A whip-smart and delightfully inventive writer, Susan Rigetti brilliantly pieces together a perceptive, humorous caper full of sharp observations about scam culture. Composed of diary entries, emails, FBI correspondence, and more, Cover Story is a fresh, fun, and wholly original novel that takes readers deep into the codependency and deceit found in a relationship built on power imbalance and lies.
WELL THAT WAS WILD.
This was a total bookstagram made me do it read. I didn’t have a clue what it was about, I just picked it up and then DEVOURED it. The fast paced nature of email, text and diary entries make this a story you can’t look away from.
And it was worth it. That ending blew my mind. I had picked up on a couple of the subtle pieces mentioned throughout, yet I was still flabbergasted at how everything worked out in the end. It was perfectly convoluted and insanely well written.
Some of the diary entries did start to feel repetitive and drawn out to where I started skimming towards the end. Otherwise though, this is a great mystery of which I’m hardly saying anything to the pages within because I highly recommend you go into this book as blind as possible!
Overall audience notes:
- Fiction / Mystery
- Language: a little
- Violence: low
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