The author's real-life experience of reviewing Edinburgh Fringe events plunges the reader in the centre of the full-on high-octane rush of the festival. You can let the events of the novel drive you at binge speed to the crisis, or you can ponder on the integrity of media reviewers who make a living killing artistic creation, and the parallel nuances of sexual predation. Revenge might have been better served cold, but would that earn five stars?
...I was stuck in the paper's dingy, draughty, empty flat, just me and Alex, day after day, while Hayley's show became brighter and more sparkling and more powerful every night. The more stories that came out about Alex, the more I wondered why my own experience of Alex's cruelty had been so small, and so chaste. He didn't buy me a sandwich that one time. That was the sum total of his transgression against me. Had there ever been any indication he might have done anything else to me? Was I just the kind of girl you didn't buy lunch, and that was it? I remembered again what Nina has said, about everyone having a bit of an Alex crush. Could I admit to that? Something of Alex was, it was true, lodged in my brain, and couldn't be prised out. He had the strange ability to make you feel as if you were the only other person who was in on a joke, the only other person who understood some fundamental truth about the world that has escaped other people, and there was something addictive about that.
