Set in the intersecting worlds of fine dining, Hollywood, and the media, a story about the underside of success and fame, and our ongoing complicity in devouring our cultural heroes.
Poised and playful ... Sly ... The chapters are told from different characters’ third-person perspectives, in agile sentences ripe with metaphor and peppered with snappy dialogue ... [A] caper ... The story pulls no punches in its scathing portrayal of the dying digital media company where Katie works ... Satire this taut and funny is hard to sustain without spiraling too far into absurdity. Boyd stays in control, but the novel’s jaunty pace and exuberant plot can’t hide its hard kernel of cynicism — there’s something inescapably bleak about all these people desperately tethering their futures to a corpse ... As tart as 'artisanal citrus,' as sharp as a chef’s knife, The Lemon is both a gleeful foodie sendup...and an incisive takedown of the commercial exploitation of just about everything, even death.
A bawdy...romp ... The dialogue crackles, the zip line plot slings the reader from one hilariously fraught incident to the next, and the conclusion is as emotionally satisfying as ever an author—or three—could have concocted. Like a perfectly seared slice of foie gras with a dollop of lingonberry jam on an artisanal toast point, The Lemon simply cannot be put down, and when you’ve finished it, you’ll want more.
