Review of She's a Lamb! by Meredith Hambrock

She's a Lamb! offers a delusional, self-congratulatory, single-minded, relentless would-be performer and builds tension and outrageously high stakes as the novel traces each of the unsympathetic protagonist's professional missteps and cutthroat choices, pushing toward what feels like an inevitable, disastrous climax to the campy story.

In Meredith Hambrock's darkly funny, satirical novel, Jessamyn St. Germain is a performer as over the top as her name. She's booking occasional commercial jobs, but she firmly believes she's destined to become famous and perform on Broadway, singing and dancing her way to superstardom.

She's hired to mind the bratty child actors for a community theatre production of The Sound of Music, but she's got her heart set on capturing the role of Maria von Trapp, and her systematic destruction of the show unfolds in gruesome detail as her powerful delusions about her talent and her deservedness shape each cutthroat decision she makes to try to propel herself onstage as the lead.

After all, she hasn't sacrificed, obsessed, planned, spent all her money on voice lessons, and humiliated herself with men in powerful positions for a mediocre acting life. Not by a long shot.

We can see what Jessamyn is unaware of in this campy story: her acting may be sound, but her singing is horrifying. She is scrambling to pay for voice lessons with someone she believes to be an expert, but we can see that the trusted teacher is a washed-up wanna-be. Jessamyn pooh-poohs a lead role in a new play because it isn't a musical and it's untested, and the reader can see that it's an edgy, promising production and would showcase what seem to be truly gifted acting skills.

She makes promises to her father about lead roles and showtimes, she banks financially and emotionally upon achieving them, and meanwhile we can see how shocked others are to hear her sharp, unpleasant singing voice.

I often have a tough time reading about protagonists who are making poor choices, but the book's dark satire is skillful, and the situation is increasingly over-the-top. Jessamyn is so far gone, even I could give in to the fascination of reading about the growing life-and-death whirlwind of destruction she's causing. Readers will likely have a clear sense that our main character is prepared to burn it all down on her ill-advised, sledgehammer-unsubtle journey to achieve stardom, and I found it irresistible to wonder how dark things would get in her relentless quest.

More about Meredith Hambrock

Meredith Hambrock's debut novel was Other People's Secrets.

I received an audiobook edition of this title courtesy of Libro.fm and Dreamscape Media.