Many Are Invited was okay at best. The housewarming party and the tradegy that was to happen there, dangled like a carrot to keep me reading. But unlikable characters and disjointed plot lines left me wanting the party to be over by the time we even got there. Steve and John are supposed to be friends, I guess.. to me Steve just seemed like a jerk who wanted to be like John but John was a jerk of a character as well. And the female characters are there just for the entertainment of the male characters to objectify with sexist and misogynistic comments/behavior. The writing itself wasn't terrible and short in length, it did make for a quick and easy read. I was initially intrigued by the back drop of Y2K, being in my 20's when it happened I wanted to reminisce about it... but that part also fell flat.. focusing mainly on the technical part of the event, how it was going to impact computers... instead of intertwining the culture and hype that I remember it being.

Other readers might enjoy the science/tech stuff and the dialogue/discussions of the characters at the party. Maybe the author was going for a noir type feel and I missed it. This just didn't work for me.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read and review honestly an advanced digital copy.

Many Are Invited by Dennis Cuesta is a compelling sharp - witted novel in which a man intrudes in his married friends' lives with unfortunate outcomes during the time of the new millennial.
Steve encounters PTSD from 20 years ago. His therapist asked him to write about it. In this first person writing we are in California during the dawn of internet and the coming of the Y2K crisis.
Steve also develops a humdinger of a friendship with John. As often happens friends move on to greener pastures, leaving their friend behind. Both men have a competitive streak one not knowing how the other felt. They would often meet at different social gatherings.
Steve has a short-live fascination with Mary that makes for an added problem when John gets engaged to Mary. Steve's jealousy of John becomes clear and Mary's roommate makes things worse with her annoying displeasure of her own life that makes the group's relationship messy. Steve starts to share with party - goers of John's 1999 party the problems in John and Mary's marriage, along with the somewhat of a conflict between them too. Steve makes problems for John and Mary when he begins to tell each one of the secrets they had kept from one another. Steve rushes into the reasons behind his period of isolation at times making it difficult to follow in the book.
Many Are Invited is part amends and part self-confession from John and the mental torments he suffered. Cuesta has written a spell binding emotional novel about the tragic aftermath of interfering and the lies of the people one encounters.
I received this book from NetGallery and Celestial Eyes Press in exchange for my honest review. I am voluntarily leaving a review of this book in my own words. #NetGalley, #ManyAreInvited, #DennisCuesta

This was just watching a messy complex friend group implode and I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would.

Thank you to net-galley for an arc Im exchange for my review.

Well…I was expecting a whodunnit going in and what I got was a Great Gatsby wanna be (thinly veiled) mixed with female characterizations seemingly written by Patrick Bateman (American Psycho).
This author cannot write female characters…unless all you want from your characters is a description of how they look. But honestly, the male characters are not very well written either. There was not really a mystery to the story, except for one particular thing that is never explained.
However if we follow the Great Gatsby storyline, I guess I can figure it out.
I didn’t like the characters, and I didn’t really like the plot, but the worst part of this book was the dialogue. I don’t think there was a single conversation these characters had that didn’t seem unrealistic and contrived.
I think a little editing could’ve improved this book greatly…and also someone to tell the author how to create characters to be more than one dimensional.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley, Celestial Eyes Press, and author Dennis Cuesta for providing me with a free ARC in exchange for my honest opinion!

As someone who was born in 1998 and was therefore alive but too young to properly remember any of the Y2K fiasco, Many Are Invited intrigued me based on the premise that the book was set during this crisis. I haven't read many books that directly occur/deal with events during this time period, and I was intrigued by the suspense elements as well in the blurb. Quickly into starting it, though, I realized this was not the book for me. The book was a very quick read, due to how short it was, and it reminded me of a hardboiled fiction-type story. It was told from the perspective of an unlikeable and unreliable male character named Steve who fell prey to one or two femme fatales. I do normally enjoy a hardboiled story, but this one didn't work for me in that it was so short. I found myself confused multiple times in the story because of the jumpy timeline and the number of events that were left out. I didn't get to see any of the four main characters flushed out, so it was hard to care or root for any of them, which left me disliking pretty much all of them. The ending felt very harried and had many loose ends that didn't make sense within the context of the novel. One of my biggest complaints, however, was the way women were objectified and described throughout by the men. The women had no role in this book other than to serve as visual pleasure to the men, and in 2022, it was extremely unpleasant to read such a book because I would think we would have moved past this tired and offensive trope by now. I am giving this a star because I am giving the author the benefit of the doubt that it was supposed to be written in a noir-type style, and I do think the concept was interesting. However, due to the poor execution of the novel and the fact that this reads like a novel by men for men, I cannot recommend.

Many Are Invited by Dennis Cuesta attracted me with the plot. The story happened during the Y2K with 30-something tech guys. It is told in one man's point of view. I just felt weirded out about the way the story is narrated by this one character. He is jealous with his colleague and trying to be better than him to the point of stealing his girlfriend. The characters are immature and the story dragged to the point I was thinking where is this story going. Whoever wrote the book description hooked me up to choose this ARC title. However, the flow of the story doesn't make much sense and the characters are weak.

A quick read that builds to a large house party with a tragic end. It is a tale of friendship, jealousy, and secrets. Set in the Nineties leading up to the Y2K computer issue, two young men meet, become friends and end up taking different career paths. One joins a lucrative startup computer company and the other remains with a stable company. A short journey of their lives and a tragic ending for one of them. Well written and succinct. Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to read and review an advance copy of this book.

1.5 stars

'Many Are Invited' centers on the night of a party on December 18, 1999 when tragedy strikes. A possible attempt at a retelling of 'The Great Gatsby', Cuesta has set the stage pivoting and playing around the Y2K problem and his two main characters, Steve (the narrator) and John, his former co-worker and pseudo-friend, meet when John has initiated the Y2K compliance team for the phone company where they work at the beginning of the story.

Bookended with narration from Steve at some point in the not-too-distant future, the length of the novel is spent with Steve recalling all the events leading up to the night of John's housewarming party.

Cuesta clearly has an understanding of his characters and their relation to the Gatsby counterparts is an interesting, modern take...but any depth to the people populating the story didn't make it to the page. The words were ripe with strange, stilted bantering and surface-level, inherent sexism. While the sexism was not abhorrently gross, the sheer quantity of casual sexist statements was repellent, especially when it clearly wasn’t supposed to be a negative aspect for a dislikable character. Given that I have almost no idea what Steve or John look like, I can tell you the way Cuesta chose for Steve to describe, analyze, and ogle nearly every female character was preposterous. Most of the dialogue scenes were disjointed and incredibly bland—like following an actual random group of two couples around while they talked and talked about their extraordinarily regular lives. There is no fun or purpose in that kind of eavesdropping.

The unfolding of the story itself felt contrived and amateurish—with Y2K being displayed front and center but with no clear purpose beyond (potentially) one line at the end. The disconnected segments that made up the story as a whole, felt both random and meaningless. This felt much more like a first draft, leaning outline rather than a complete, edited, and polished story. There's a kernel of an idea here, but the execution needs several more revisits.

2.5 stars. This book is not really about Y2K, but about two men who meet working on Y2K - John and Steve. They are friendly, yet competitive. The writing in simplistic, but then again, so are the thoughts of Steve, the narrator. Most of the events would not have happened if they'd bothered to speak to each other like normal adults.

"A housewarming party ends in tragedy. . . Steve Galanos, a native Midwesterner, reflects on his time in and near Silicon Valley during the 1990s, a time when the two-digit year emerged as the Y2K problem, the burgeoning Internet fueled the expansion of the New Economy, the dot-com bubble created unseen prosperity and real estate frenzies. Yet it’s a housewarming party, held in late 1999, that affects him the most."

Thanks to NetGalley and Celestial Eyes Press for the free ARC in exchange for my honest review. All opinions expressed herein are my own.

Many Are Invited by: Dennis Cuesta, Publish date - 10/6/22

Synopsis: A housewarming party ends in tragedy. . . Steve Galanos, a native Midwesterner, reflects on his time in and near Silicon Valley during the 90's, a time when the two-digit year emerged as the Y2K problem, the burgeoning Internet fueled the expansion of the New Economy, the dot-com bubble created unseen prosperity and real estate frenzies. Yet it’s a housewarming party, held in late 99, that affects him the most.

I felt the story was more of a man's story in my opinion. A lot of locker room talk about sexism, woman, politics and religion. I found it complicated at times and hard to finish.

Thank you to #NetGalley and #CelestialEyesPress for the e-ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

A housewarming party in December 1999 has a tragic ending irrevocably changing the lives of four people in Dennis Cuesta’s Many Are Invited.
Reflecting on his time spent with friends and working for a phone company on solutions for with the impending Y2K problem near Silicon Valley in the mid-to late 1990s as the Internet expanded and contributed to new levels of prosperity, Steve finds himself haunted by the events of a housewarming party in 1999. Reminiscing about how the party thrown by John and Mary Goertz even came to be, Steve reveals how he met John in 1994 at work and how he didn’t like him at first but found that they were both from the Midwest, which helped them to bond and become friends. Detailing events throughout the years that led to John meeting, and later marrying, Mary, as well as meeting Lauren, Mary’s roommate, an interesting dynamic between the four emerged that contributed to the chaos for a disastrous outcome of the party.
Focusing on the relationship dynamics between the four characters, who each contribute to the destruction of an otherwise happy occasion, the tragedy obliquely referred to at the story’s outset slowly comes to light piecemeal as Steve recalls details that flesh out a picture of what exactly happened. Much of the narrative concerned the interpersonal dynamics, as filtered through Steve’s perspective, between John, Lauren, Mary, and Steve, both as a broader group and in various iterations of pairs, which presented as infidelity in some scenarios; it was intriguing to see the psychological elements that compelled each of them and how they interacted with the others. The writing had numerous instances where transitions between events or actions didn't exist, which resulted in a jarring shift that pulled focus from the intricacies of the relationships and instead placed it on how or why the scene had suddenly changed and it was rather heavy-handed with references to The Great Gatsby. Though important facts were obscured from the start was clearly established, there persisted a strong sense that vital details weren’t shared with readers, leading to a devolving of the narrative as it wrapped up too rapidly and leaving too many things unsatisfyingly resolved or explained – perhaps in an effort to be surprising or shocking, but the execution was underwhelming if that's the case – though there was an entertaining ironic twist of fate.
Overall, I’d give it a 2.5 out of 5 stars.
*I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Not for me. The religion and politics talk isn’t something I’m interested in reading about and I didn’t Realize it would be so heavy in this book before requesting. The story kind of dragged for a while and I couldnt relate to any of the characters. Written well, I’m just not the reader for this one.

At first, I didn’t know what to make of this. Two guys working together preparing for Y2K while chasing girls. Fast forward as life moves on and John and Steve are still friends even after leaving a mutual job. John finds love and Steve carries on with his life. John finds love with Mary even though his original pursuit had been Lauren, Mary’s best friend. While this was a quick read I was ultimately trying to figure out the purpose the author had for these characters. The ending and the irony made it all worth it.

Set in the run-up to Y2K, this comedic tragedy tells the story of two sets of friends, Steve and John and their romantic interests, Mary and Lauren.

Steve's narrative tone, and particularly his description of female characters, was off-putting at the start, but after the first several chapters, as the story began to take shape, the voice began to fit better with it. Although the narrator was never a person I would want to spent time with in real life, his observations were incisive and entertaining, and the novel is a quick and absorbing read.

The unfortunate exceptions to this "quick and absorbing" descriptor were a handful of overly drawn-out dialogues, apparently designed to further the philosophical and literary themes of the novel. While interesting in small doses, these sometimes became too heavy-handed to suit the overall tone. Notwithstanding these bits, Many Are Invited was an interesting, unusual, and thought-provoking story.

1.5⭐️
Initially I was excited about this book, but my excitement quickly deflated once I started reading, the book overall was a chore to read, but my biggest issue was the authors referencing of woman..it was insulting ..I am by no mean easily offended, by there’s no need to refer to women by the body shape or their hair color.
Maybe there is an audience for this book, I’m sure there is, but I am not it.


Thank you to Celestial Eye Press and NetGalley for an e-ARC of this book, all thoughts are my own. Release dat October 6, 2022

I remember the whole Y2K movement back in 1999. OMG! Most everyone was worried about our electronics and what would happen when 2000 would come in. Funny thing though, I never worried because I thought it was silly. The human cry was that our computers and anything electronic would start from the beginning instead of knowing to turn to 2000. The end of time was coming! What would we do when 2000 rolled in? Some Americans built shelters and was storing up on food and water. Wow! Just thinking about it again really makes me chuckle, because as you can see, life continued. Time didn’t stop and our computers survived the year change. Our character, Steve Galanos, found himself working at a company in 1999 worrying about Y2K. He was on the team with the special IT group designed and charged with making sure everyone’s electronics would function correctly when 00 arrived.

However, Steve, was over the whole conversation, much like me at that time, and he was concerned but not overly so. His boss and friend, John, headed up the Y2K team and they struck up a fast friendship. They were constantly flirting in the office. Penning women “Swedes” and giving them numbers based on how they looked and how they were built. On one of their many dares, Steve dared John to go into this store where he saw a hottie that he figured John would not be able to pull. Well, John proved Steve wrong, so much so, he not only did not pull the babe he asked him to score, but he ended up asking the hottie’s coworker out. She wasn’t as beautiful, but she was cute. John discovered that the woman he ended up with was named Mary and her coworker who was the hot babe was named Lauren. What do you know, the two of them were roommates meaning Steve could join in the fun and they could double date.

Things began to heat up quickly for John and Mary leaving Steve and Lauren to fend for themselves. When the friends went out, Mary let them know that she and John were engaged, and that, readers is where this story begins to unfold. This story works up quickly because it’s a short read, but I found the story to be misleading.

I was of the impression this story was really going to center around Y2K and have our main characters navigating through it, but it turns out this story really didn’t have much to do with Y2K, or not entirely. There are things I’d like to say, but it would cause spoilers and I do not do spoilers. I also noticed a discrepancy that wasn’t intended to be, I think, but I went back to check the story because it was bothering me. Again, I can’t get into it because it would spoil the story for some, however, I’ll say this. When you read the first chapter, especially the last paragraph of that chapter, it really stuck in my mind. So, when I got to the end of the story. I began scratching my head because I was waiting on something to happen, but I think the author may have forgotten what he discussed in the first chapter. Or, what happened at the end was a metaphor for what he was discussing in the first chapter and that was the entire point? In other words, readers, you need to read the book to fully understand what I’m getting at.

Overall, I wasn’t feeling this story. I found it dragging a lot and quite boring. I dozed off a few times and was shocked I wasn’t still reading. The biggest hurdle to get over was the chapters dealing with the homecoming party that seemed to go on forever and I lost interest in all the different partygoers’ conversations. It was too many people to keep up with and I really wasn’t invested.

My thanks to Net Galley and Celestial for allowing me to review this arc.

The best way I can describe this is Great Gatsby meets the Dot.com Era with jealousy, a dwindling friendship, and love from a distance. I found the dot.com stuff a bit boring and could not connect to any qualities of the characters. However book was a quick and easy read. Just an ok for me. Not wowed.

I had a hard time getting into this book. I found the Y2K issue a boring start. But, once involved, I found the book to flow rather quickly. I wanted to find out where this would all go.
The characters were not very likable and I never really cared what happened to any of them.
This was not a very good book at all.

Many are Invited by Dennis Cuesta

Published: October 6, 2022
Celestial Eyes Press
Pages: 254
Genre: Psychological Fiction
KKECReads Rating: 4/5
I received a copy of this book for free, and I leave my review voluntarily.

Dennis Cuesta is a native of California; and attended the University of Michigan and remained in the Upper Midwest during his early career. Stuck in Manistique is his first novel. Dennis and his wife did get stuck in Manistique once, long ago. The interrupted trip served as inspiration for the book.

“Tragedy yearns to be mourned and remembered and mourned some more.”

Steve goes through the motions, doing just enough to get by without being dinged in any radar. When a new guy shows up with big ideas and gets recognition, Steve isn’t thrilled. Making waves is rarely a good thing. When the two become friends, Steve keeps his jealousy and resentment hidden, or so he thinks. Until the night of the housewarming party.

This was an unusual book. Well written and interestingly presented, but unusual. I enjoyed how the story was told, and I found the characters engaging. This was almost like a voyeuristic look into jealousy, resentment, and ego.

Steve was likable, and he had decent enough qualities. But he didn’t want to do anything to change his situation. And he resented his friend John who did. Steve felt like things just happened in John’s favor, but John also took risks and made the moves to make things happen.

John had the motivation to make things happen. He took risks, he made moves, and it paid off. He wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t a monster.

The storyline for this book stays pretty level, nothing too crazy happens, but the plot is engaging and entertaining. I was captivated by the pure presentation of humanity that was presented on these pages.

This is an emotional journey, and I can’t decide if I am happy with how things ended or annoyed that I still have questions. The humanness of this book is so realistic.

I enjoyed this story more than I expected. The writing was well done, and the plot was unique.

DNF. I just felt like this story was dragging too much, and I didn’t care about the main characters who seemed pretty unlikable. I think the prose is okay and the premise is interesting/I want to know what happens, so I might pick it up again at some point. However I don’t feel like fighting my way through something I’m not enjoying so, for now at least, I’m putting it down.