by Bob Proehl
First sentence: “Alex Torrey, nine but small for his age, writes the names of the places on the exit signs in his notebook.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: June 28, 2016
Review copy put in my box at work by the purchasing manager.
Content:  There’s a bunch — a couple dozen — of f-bombs, plus other swearing, and some sexytimes, though nothing graphic. It’ll be in the adult fiction section of the bookstore.

By all accounts, I should love this book. A single mother, the former star of a beloved canceled sci-fi show, travels across the country attending ComicCons (some big, some small), meeting all sorts of cosplayers and comic writers and artists as she comes to terms with letting her nine-year-old son live permanently (at least temporarily) with her ex-husband, his father.

Except, I didn’t like it. At all. (In fact, I thought upon finishing it: “This is why I don’t read that many adult books anymore!”) It wasn’t bad enough to bail on; in fact, I kept hoping that it’d get better.  But I just didn’t like it. I wanted to like the inside peek behind the scenes of a con, of the ups and downs of being a cosplayer, or even one of the main talent. I’m not too terribly interested in the politics of comics (that’s more Hubby’s ballgame), and there was a lot of  time devoted to the politics of characters, the dynamics between artists and writers, and the politics of creating a storyline, none of which I was interested in.  (And that’s not even mentioning the precocious nine-year-old who was simultaneously too young and too old to be real.)

I wanted to like it. I hoped to like it. But, in the end, it just fell flat.