Joe McGinniss Jr.

This is a tough book to review. It takes place right after the global financial crisis, when a couple from Boston, move to Southern California to grab their piece of the American Dream, in this case the get rich quick, fix and flip.
There should be no surprise about how this works out. The problem with the book is that the two main characters are both reprehensible. There is very little to like about either of them, and since from the beginning you know how most of the book will turn out, reading it becomes a bit of a chore.… (más)

I literally had to force myself to finish The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss Jr.. This is a bleak, dark novel filled with loser characters who survive in the underbelly of Las Vegas and are on a one way path to nowhere. One character spends most of the book declaring that he is leaving Vegas but neither the readers or any one else actually believes that he will go.

Chase is a 25 year old wannabe artist who has returned home to Las Vegas. He originally took a job as an art teacher but after being fired spends his time as a driver, delivering the local prostitutes to their appointments. Michelle, a prostitute dreams of making big money and buying herself the security and safety that she dreams of, but most of her money is spend on drugs and booze. She also begins recruiting and training teenage girls for the trade, including one of Chase’s former students, Rachel. Meanwhile Rachel’s teenage boyfriend, is not happy with her choices and he blames Chase for her bad decisions.

I did not enjoy this seedy story, in fact, it made me want to wash my hands every time I picked it up. The Delivery Man wasn’t particularly well written and the characters seemed flat and one dimensional. I was disappointed as I had higher expectations than this poorly written story. I probably wouldn’t have finished this book except that I was reading it for an alphabet challenge but the time spent reading this book was truly wasted.… (más)

This sick sad saga of the lives of the aspirationals during the Financial Crisis may linger with me for a while, but the lack of even one likable character is daunting. Lured out to LA by a job offer that is later rescinded, Nick and Phoebe struggle to make payments on their McMansion in a semi-abandoned development rife with home invasions and coyote kills. Phoebe, in pharma sales, grants sexual favors to MDs to keep her bonus. Nick rents out houses he doesn't own. The desperation is deep and the ending seemingly tacked on. But the era was so brutal that why shouldn't a recap novel be the same?… (más)

Carousel Court, the second novel from Joe McGinniss Jr., is a brutal take on the mortgage/housing collapse that ruined the dreams and lives of so many homeowners in the late 2000s. Those were the days when banks used unbelievably low interest rate home loans with minimal down payment requirements to lure first-time buyers into purchasing homes they could not actually afford to own. Nick and Phoebe Maguire, a young married couple living in Boston, were two of the people who got caught up in all the excitement of what seemed to be a sure way to make some easy money: move to California, buy way more house than they can really afford, live in that house long enough for its value to rise well above what they owe on it, and flip the house for a quick profit that can be put into an even bigger home they can't really afford.

Considering how many people were doing exactly that, the plan did not seem to be all that risky to Nick and Phoebe. What happens, though, when the market collapses and home prices drop like a rock because no one is buying? Well, as Nick and Phoebe learned, that is the point at which your life pretty much goes to hell. In a game of musical chairs of this magnitude, someone is always going to be left standing at the end of the game- and this time, it is homeowners like Nick and Phoebe who believed that housing prices would rise forever. Their chair was pulled out from under them so suddenly that they never even thought about sitting down.

Now Nick and Phoebe are just trying to hold on as long as they can without having the bank repossess their home. Carousel Court, the street they live on, is one on which every homeowner (with a single exception) is trying to do the same thing. One neighbor has taken to burning everything he owns in his backyard pool, one spends all his time in the well-armed orange tent he has pitched in his front yard to scare off looters, and the others do all they can to pretend that the world is not collapsing around them.

In the meantime, the California job that convinced Nick and Phoebe to relocate from Boston to Los Angeles in the first place does not exist when Nick gets there to claim it. And Phoebe, rather than being able to spend three months off with her young son, has to scramble to get a position with the pharmaceutical company she quit in Boston - a job she detests for the way it forces her to degrade herself to the doctors who purchase what she is selling (sometimes it seems all she is selling is herself).

Unable to focus on her job, and herself hopelessly addicted to some of the very pills she is selling, Phoebe is unable even to take care of her son, much less worry about her home and husband. But she has a plan, one that she cannot share with Nick if their marriage is to survive. And unbeknownst to Phoebe, Nick has a plan of his own, an illegal one that allows him to pocket thousands of dollars a month - until someone bigger and meaner than him decides to cut him out of the deal. So now facing imminent financial ruin, a failed marriage, and with little hope that things will ever work out for them in the future, Nick and Phoebe have hit rock bottom.

Bottom Line: Carousel Court is a frank look at what happens to good people when they lose control of their lives. It is difficult at times to have much sympathy for the book's two main characters because they seem to be so willing, almost eager, to do anything it takes to ensure their individual survival. That makes for difficult reading at times, but the book's bigger flaw is that, about half way through, it reaches a point at which very little seems to be happening other than what happened the day before – and the day before that, and the day before that. If the book had been perhaps fifty pages shorter, its message would have been a more memorable one – as it is, that message is muted by the repetition that surrounds it.… (más)