“I lived life on the line that bordered stupid and clever. It’s called being sly”. 

To be sly is to have a cunning or deceitful nature. To act surreptitiously. To remark, glance, or express something in a way that insinuates one has some secret knowledge that could be harmful or embarrassing. 

Catchpenny is a sly novel. It is clever, cunning, deceitful, and it is stupid…if you want to count stupid crazy. That’s probably why I liked it so much. 

Urban fantasy noir (which is what I largely categorize this book as) is a subgenre mashup that I never get to read much of but I love a whole lot (just like my enduring love for cybertech noir, another subgenre mashup). When we get down to subgenre mashups I feel we’re hitting full-on speculative fiction territory–we’re entering all-new territory. In books like this, there are rules but also? Screw the rules. 

I had a similar experience nearing the end of reading Catchpenny as I did with reading Noah Hawley’s Anthem: In this book the adults are the problem. The youth are the solution. The youth isn’t wasted on the young. It’s the adults who should be ashamed of the way they’ve wasted their lives and traded in all of their promises and dreams for empty lives filled up with selfish wants and needs when they could have had a fuller life and a fuller heart by spreading love, knowledge, and resources around to be used by more people. 

It’s a little longer than I thought it needed to be, but Catchpenny is an intricate web of a story that has a large cast of characters and events that are all interconnected. It takes time to establish those strands, get them settled in place, bring the third act to its climax, and then to unravel the web without ripping it and risk a messy dismount from such a carefully constructed plot. 

I thought it was a wonderful read. I love out of the box books, and this definitely meets that brief. 

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.