Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia

When one goes on (an actual, non-camping) vacation and goes into a famous bookstore, one doesn't want to buy all the stuff one already has on their TBR. (Just me? Okay.) And so after picking out two other books (one of which I was never going to get from the library on time for book club, and one in my preferred genre, romance), I started wandering around aimlessly in search of something that caught my eye. Well, this cover features my favorite color (the hottest pink imaginable), the title was funny, and I flipped to the middle and started reading and it was entertaining enough that I was cool with buying and reading it immediately. As a vacation book, this is the exact opposite vibe of Cold Sassy Tree. It is fast-paced verging on breakneck. There is no shortage of plot. It did not matter one bit that this was the third book in the series and that I had never heard of this author or series before. It is slightly futuristic, and absurd, but not so absurd that you don't recognize this reality. It did its job. I snort-laughed a few times.The downside is that I'm hard-pressed to remember all the plot points - I just re-read the description and was like, “there was a crime? Oh RIGHT, there WAS a crime...” and the mayoral election is played up in a lot of ways that resemble a national one, and also one of the candidates was a thinly veiled caricature of That Guy Who Was Our Most Recent Past-President, and that made the election stuff less fun, even if it was still well-written.CW for the stuff I can remember off the top of my head: kidnapping, staging one's own murder, staging other people's murders, MALE GENITALIA BEING LOPPED OFF BY PSYCHOPATHS, people being fed through woodchippers, physical/psychological abuse of sex workers, ridiculous stunts, body-shaming/fat-shaming. It was entertaining, absolutely, but I'm not in a hurry to pick up any of the others in the series. Though apparently it's being adapted for TV and I could maybe be into that, depending on which streamer it lands on.Powell's, in Portland