Oh, the boring problems of privilege. I tried. I just couldn't finish this book. It was a NetGalley. There are plenty of people who love this book. But trainwrecks aren't my favorite thing to watch. I got 21% into it. But my reading time is best spent with books, of which I have thousands, most free, that I like to read. So moving on.

Elsa goes from Mr. Wrong to Mr. Worse in this self-destructive Ferris wheel of misadventures. Set in glittery Southern California, land of fallen angels and illusions, this literary bad-girl of a book delivers layered, interior character development via a fast-lane, first-person point of view. On the outside, Elsa is a gorgeous, well-off, 30-ish assistant-curator in the high-stakes art industry. Inside, she’s an alienated, lovesick, unemployed drifter with a serious dedication to drinking and pills of many colors.

When she’s invited by old friends to sail away for a party weekend on idyllic Catalina Island, what could go wrong? Elsa—still pining over very-married Eric, her former boss who dumped her—plunges into many emotional twists and turns. Debut novelist Liska Jacobs truly nails the details of setting: an island resort, a romantic sailboat, Los Angeles, the art world. Elsa may not be a reliable friend, but her story makes for a fun beach read if you’re in the mood for a wounded, gritty heroine who gets swept in new directions. In order to emerge from her damaged childhood and recent break-up, Elsa’s only way is forward. With some detours into sex, drugs, drinking, and once-in-awhile: self-reflection.

At first I didn't have high expectations for this novel, but I was pleasantly surprised by Elsa's dark, reckless anger and the realistic - if not happy - ending. Jacobs writes compelling characters that make for a fascinating story, even when they are just hanging out on Catalina. I will be reading whatever Jacobs decides to write next, especially if it features a strong, angry anti-heroine like Elsa.

Thank you to Netgalley,, the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book in return for my honest opinion.

You know how you read a blurb for a book and you think, ooh, this is gonna be good? That is the way I felt about the blurb on this book; so I was so disappointed to discover that I hated the main character, Elsa. I liked the overall storyline, but Elsa got on my last nerve. As much as I couldn't tear away from her self destruct impulse, I just hated her. Sorry.

This book was like a Hunter S. Thompson (or dare I say Hemingway?) book but with a woman as the focus of the downward, drug-and-alcohol-fueled spiral. I'm rating the book slightly above the middle-mark because this concept of WOMAN as the spin-out person, without a psychological breakdown included, is somewhat refreshing. However, the fact that the spin-out is driven by an idiotic relationship with some older dude who then 'ends it' makes the whole thing a bit more pathetic. First of all, if your *dream* is to work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, why not get into museum studies, art librarianship? I get that you can be young and get to work as a curatorial assistant to maybe get into the field, get a leg up, build connections, etc. etc. But then why in HELL would you get involved with your narcissistic, he's-most-definitely-done-this-for-decades, predatory-professor-like, boss? Why? WHYYYYYYY?

So I don't know. A tale as old as time, I suppose. Young 'ingenue' falls for dreamy older mentor/boss, *knows* they'll leave their wife for them, is DEVASTATED and BROKEN BY LIFE when he fails to do so, and life around them is methodically burned down with it. Why do young women do this? Personal failings? Poor preparation for realities of life? Is it, as the story seems to suggest, the "downside" lot-in-life scenario that befalls women who are (unfortunately) too pretty? I have a hard time empathizing with this argument, mostly because nothing is learned by the women who experience this. They aren't suddenly like, "Oh, I should stop using my looks when it works to my advantage, and purely rely on my brains and experience from here on out." There's the "I'm sad, empathize with me" moment, then back to the same. Ugh.

HOWEVER. Rant over - I DID like the element of Elsa's character that shrugged off the view of a woman's 'appropriate' life including lifelong connection to a partner, and children. The author inserted some power-taking there. I just wish it wasn't so crumbled by the primary reason for the spiral (old dude she was an idiot for getting involved with to start). And props to the author for never really making her physically victimized by the men she interacted with as an unholy-hot-mess. That would have been the next formula move, which I guess she managed to sidestep.

This book isn't for feeling good. It's like watching train wreck. And it should have ended several chapters earlier. My emotions when thinking back to reading it are a haze of heart-sadness, tinged with anger, irritation, and shame for this person's life.

This was definitely a dark story. There were times that I just wanted to put it down, it was just so depressing what Elsa was going through. Then there were times when I just wanted to slap her. Unfortunately, there were too many times when I could relate. I had to follow her journey and see if she made it out alright.

I'm glad that I did continue on with Elsa's journey as I found it very interesting.

I would also like to commend the cover art work, beautiful job!

Thanks to Farrar, Straus & Girous and Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

This book is good but I didn't enjoy it. In fact, I wrestled with it most of the way through. I found it extremely depressing, both the plot and the theme of a woman finding her happiness in the form of a man. Looking at the story as a whole, there is nothing wrong with it. The writing is excellent, characters are thoroughly developed and it grabs you emotionally, but it bothered me.

*I received an advance reading copy in exchange for my honest review. All opinions expressed are my own.*

I loved the voice of the protagonist, and got really sucked into her suffering. I wasn’t sure if I felt like the journey was worth going on, in the end, but the author is a strong writer and definitely one to watch

DNF @ 3%

I read a single chapter of this book. It was enough. Catalina is the story of Elsa Fisher, a woman that spirals out of control after her affair with her married boss is discovered. She returns home, to a place where she never wanted to return to, to people she never wanted to see again, but she slips easily back into that life. Except everything is a tragedy because well, life is just so hard.

“Charly? She will definitely want to go shopping. And we will get Frappuccinos with skim milk, and try on dresses, and talk about whatever argument she and Jared are currently in the middle of. God, how exhausting to be back.”

I guess I never really understood why she HAD to go back home. Sure, maybe that’s explained in a later chapter, but she’s introduced as this martyr that loses her job and just gives up and goes back home. Why didn’t she try to get a new job? Why do I care? Oh wait, I don’t.

“The room-service boy lingers, saying he thinks redheads are pretty. He’s young and breakable and it would feel so goddamn good to break something.”

Yeah, Elsa Fisher is a pleasant individual. Real likable.

“I shower with my drink and take one of Mother’s Vicodins.”

Oh goodie. I picked up the novelization of a soap opera. Hard pass.

I received this book free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

“Dazzle a man and you blind him.”

From a few pre-publication quotes, I had a feeling that I’d love Catalina, a debut novel from Liska Jacobs. What is so attractive, so alluring about Kamikaze Women–self-destructive women whose messy personal disasters surround them in a blurring cloud of detritus? These are women who simultaneously attract and repel–women whose lives crumble at the foundations as they careen, hopelessly, from one catastrophe to another.

The Kamikaze Woman in Catalina is our narrator Elsa, who washes back up in California after being ‘let-go’ from her job as personal assistant to MoMA’s curator, the very married Eric Reinhardt. Elsa and Eric had an affair, and we don’t know what went wrong, but the affair ends with Elsa being given a “generous compensation” package by Human Resources. We get, right away, that Elsa is being discarded and paid off, but Elsa, hard-as-nails, but also interestingly brittle, doesn’t quite ‘get’ the fact that she’s been summarily dumped.

Catalina

Elsa begins to think that New York feels “predatory,” and so home to Bakersfield and her mother’s house, ostensibly to lick her wounds. But home doesn’t offer consolation:

Poor girl, the joke’s on you. You’re back. Your old life just waiting for you, like a second skin.

So Elsa escapes with a quick flight to LA and then it’s a short drive to Santa Monica. Elsa holes up in a luxury hotel, enrolling in a yoga course but going to the bar instead, dropping money even as she tries not to think about Eric from the blurriness of a cocktail of unknown drugs (stolen from her mother) and alcohol.

There are many bottles. Probably too many, I think. So I combine a few that look similar. Who cares? I definitely do not. After all. I’m doing what Eric suggested on that last day: Go Home. See your mother in Bakersfield. Be open to possibility. Fine, a blue one if the mood strikes, or maybe a white, or sea-foam green. So many possibilities.

The scenes at the hotel are marvellous. The sniffy disapproval of the waiters and other guests as Elsa polishes off bottle after bottle of alcohol, ordering up coke though room service, and the way she teases a Lancelot in bellboy clothing.

Instead I call room service and order another Bloody Mary, which, I tell myself, is basically a salad.

Finally, with numerous traumas and dramas played out, Elsa calls up her old friend Charly, who is married to Jared. Elsa expects her friend to be mired in domestic bliss, but it’s clear that there are problems between Charly and Jared. He makes cruel comments to his wife and keeps a lascivious eye on Elsa:

“Have you been working out?” he asks. I tell him the most exercise I get is lifting a wineglass to my mouth or opening a prescription bottle. This enthralls him.

Elsa’s ex-husband Robbie now works for Jared, and so before long, Elsa finds herself on a trip to Catalina to attend a jazz festival with Charly, Jared, Robbie, his new girlfriend Jane and millionaire boat owner, the very alpha male, Tom. Tom’s family own ” a potato chip company, real American money.”

He’s well groomed, scrubbed clean, and absolutely menacing.

Of course, this trip is a recipe for disaster. Charly’s marriage is unhappy, Jared is openly womanizing, Robbie still has the hots for his ex and Jane, a restaurant manager, is … well… on the tiresome side. “She’s always doing some marathon or on a new diet.” She’s “very animated. Her arms and hands wave as if she were an instructor worried about losing Robbie’s interest.” As for Tom, he says that Elsa, brought along on the Catalina trip as a date, reminds him of his first wife:

Hot as shit but absolutely bonkers.

Catalina is the provocative, unsettling story of one woman’s meltdown, but it’s also a story of a handful of people behaving badly. A novel of Bad Manners, if you will. Everyone thinks that wildly successful Elsa is back on an extended holiday, but Tom, who claims he can hear Elsa’s pills rattling in her bag, has Elsa’s number, and he delights in watching the trip implode as couples fight, friction escalates and lives collide.

The big question here is Elsa’s state before being dumped by Eric. There are elusive shards of the past tantalizingly submerged in the plot, and most of these float to the surface through Elsa’s memories of her marriage to Robbie. But this is a woman who doesn’t want to examine her life and her mistakes; she’s much prefer to blur the past, and the present, with alcohol and whatever pills she can dig out from the alarmingly diminishing supply which lurks at the bottom of her bag. I loved Catalina; it’s just the sort of book I am always looking for and find so rarely–people behaving badly within the rails of polite society.

I squint to try to make out where the pier should be, where the Miramar is, where the airport and Charly and Jared’s house should be. Bakersfield just north and inland-New York and Eric a few thousand miles beyond that. It’s there, I’m sure. I suddenly feel lightheaded. Strange. Like catching your reflection, that moment just before recognition, when you are a stranger to yourself.

Review copy

(The idea of Kamikaze Women comes from Woody Allen and the film Husbands and Wives.)

It is ironic that I read this book, which chronicals a downward spiral, while reading another book which is literally called "Spiraling Upward", by Wendy Wallbridge.
I was pulled in by the descriptions of decadence so real I could smell and taste them. The beautiful scenery and the ugly personalities were an intoxicating mix. I would say there is not a reliable narrator in the bunch of mostly unsavory characters -
neither the slightly sociopathic protagonist or her immature, self indulgent friends. It was facinating to get inside Elsa's skin and try to figure out her motivation for such self destructiveness. I thought the descriptions of her previous job at the MoMA in NYC added a new dimension and made the narrative more interesting. The slight twist at the end to all the relationships was really good, just what the story needed. I would definitely read more from this author.

As narrating heroines go, Elsa – the voice of Jacob’s debut – is pitched towards the lower depths of the likeability spectrum. Hard-drinking, pill-popping, drug-snorting, sexually reckless, she’s also happy with minor theft, indiscriminate seduction and generally laying waste to her own person and those of others straying into her orbit.

Elsa is back in California, where she grew up, after a short-ish, inglorious career in New York, working at MoMA and sleeping with her boss Eric. Still besotted with Eric, and too ashamed of her fall from the high pinnacle of escape and success to tell her old Californian friends, she takes refuge, initially, in a luxury hotel where life consists of getting high, getting drunk, getting laid and getting unconscious.

Eventually, though, Elsa reconnects with her old circle which include BFF Charly (and her jock husband Jared), ex-husband Roddy (who still loves Elsa), Roddy’s competitive girlfriend Jane and their new friend Tom, a rich cynic with an impressive yacht. A plan to visit the island of Catalina for the jazz festival hooks all parties together for a rancid getaway.

Elsa, we are repeatedly told, is beautiful, and Charly and Roddy clearly love her, but readers may not. This burnt-out wastrel does twang notes of self-determination and empowerment in her many monologues, and grief too for her father’s death, but it’s hard to stay in touch with her appealing – or campaigning – side among the onslaught of self-abuse and heedlessness that comprise her story.

While the drinks and drugs are plentiful, events in this book are few. The affair with Eric blossomed and ended before the narrative begins, and the trip to Catalina seems scarcely enough substance to float an entire novel, even though a dramatic event draws it to a close.

Ultimately – indeed for much of the tale – the reader is waiting for Elsa to reach bottom, cease indulging her every self-destructive whim and get on with her life. It’s a long wait and when the conclusion comes, it shows the author maintaining her vision rather than following the predictable path. Thank heavens, at least, for a non-redemptive outcome.

Nevertheless, this darkly readable novel’s rebarbative stance comes as something of a challenge. Yes, there’s a discussion going on among writers these days about why female characters need to be nice people, but Elsa doesn’t seem so much a part of that conversation as simply the worst sinner amongst a charmless crew in a La La Land morality tale.

Californian noir? Bret Easton Ellis burnout in a skirt? Or an unusual beach read? Readers will make their own decisions, meanwhile here’s hoping Jacobs’ talent, on its next outing, will be devoted less to a one-note tune and more of a melody.

I went through a phase when I would read books about reformed party girls. I mean, I still read them, but less often than before.

In Catalina, we, the reader, find Elsa at a crossroads. She's recently been fired from MoMA after an affair with her boss and she quickly jets to LA to burn through her severance package. Elsa is lost, drowning herself in drugs and alcohol. While in LA, Elsa's unraveling start to affect everyone around her, and we, the reader, are waiting for her to hit rock bottom.

This is a well-written book with a vein of darkness a la American Psycho. This isn't a light-hearted romp to LA.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book in exchange for this review.

I enjoyed the book even though I found it hard to connect with the main character as much as I had hoped to. Still, an entertaining story that kept me interested. Would like to read more from the author in the future!

Elsa has just come out of a bad affair. Feeling wronged by everything in life she cashes out her savings and heads to California to end her story with the help of copious amounts of booze and drugs. Her friends who meet her there don't know that Elsa's plans don't line up with theirs. Suspenseful, anxiety fueled, page turning!

Really did not like this book and did not finish it. Elsa, who makes really stupid decisions in her life, wallows in how bad it is. She was not a sympathetic character at all.

I missed something here. Instead of a beautiful portrayal of a woman facing a rough patch in her life, I read the story of a woman who historically ran away from her problems and ran so far she was back at the beginning. I felt no sympathy for the pill popping, booze guzzling Elsa who somehow expected that her affair with her boss would end up any better than her losing her job and not getting the man. I realize this makes me sound rather self-righteous, but isn't that the norm? Why should she expect a different result than all the poor women who have fallen for this in the past? After this, Elsa returns to the west coast to lie to her friends, which includes her ex-husband and his new girlfriend, about how great life is and to squander away her severance package. Even though I was able to sympathize with a couple of the characters, I found none of them likable and felt like they were all on their own paths of self-destruction. This made for uncomfortable reading. Was that the point of the book? I guess perhaps the fault was mine in expecting some redeeming quality in a story about a human train wreck.

A sad tale of a young woman that has hit rock bottom. Elsa has recently been let go of her dream job at MoMa because she was having an affair with her very married boss. She is absolutely devastated. She flies home to California where she reunites with not only her family but her college best friends. She spends her days in a complete haze due to self medicating with an array of pills, lots of alcohol, cocaine, and random sex with strangers which will lead her to devastating consequences.

It's hard to garner much sympathy for Elsa because she continually makes bad choices and rather than owning them she'd prefer to just walk away and not deal with it. She really doesn't care about anyone except herself. She may not sound like someone you'd want to read about but Liska Jacobs writes so beautifully that you are compelled to continue. This one was very good indeed.

Thank you so much to NetGalley & Farrar, Straus and Giroux for granting my wish to read this in exchange for my honest review.

Yowsa. Elsa is really determined to take herself down to the ground after she loses her job. That severance package, well, it would have been better spent doing something other than drinking, taking drugs, and staying in hotels. I wanted to tell her to sober up and stop it but that would have meant that this book would not have existed, although it also would have saved her friends some pain. Elsa's selfish behavior impacts Charly, Robby, and Jared- all of whom have their own problems. This is a darkly fascinating page turner. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Think of this as a psychological thriller.

Thank you to FSG Originals and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for this review.

Elsa is falling to the bottom. This is what she intends to do. After all, she recently just lost her job at MoMa after an affair with her married boss. She heads to LA to blow off some steam, as well as her severance package. Her friends, including her ex husband, meet her (they think she is on vacation and welcome her back to the west coast) and all go on a booze filled sailing journey to Catalina.

There is nothing to celebrate, according to Elsa. She is miserable. She is consuming tons of alcohol and random pills to drive herself even further down. In the process of her fall, she reveals painful memories, which hurts those with her. She is angry and reckless and doesn't care who is taking the fall with her.

I didn't care for Elsa, obviously. I don't think you are supposed to. There is no feeling sorry for her. This book is not about a joyous trip with friends out on the water, it's about one person's behavior and how it hurts those around her. At first, I wasn't a fan of the book because it made me feel terrible, but I believe that it was the author intended to do. The writing is strong, and Elsa is the star with her compulsive, dark behavior. There are other story lines, including friendship and love, but it's obviously the Elsa's attitude towards these that are the star.