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I mean I'm no stranger to awful people in fiction, but 81-year old widower Maggie Burkhardt is the final boss of busybody, octogenarian Karens. Holed up at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel in Luxor Egypt, she's on a one-woman quest to "fix" the misaligned couples she encounters on vacation. Whether they like it or not. The first third of the book is a slow, bordering on arduous, boil. Maggie splits her time vaguely intimating that her meddling may have taken a tragic turn in the past and smugly comparing the middling affairs of the couples around her to the incandescent love she shared with her husband Peter. She is the distillation of every obliviously insufferable boomer Facebook harridan that just can't mind their own. Given our current gerontocracy, where cruelty seems to be the point, maybe this grated more than I was ready for.

And then she meets 8-year old Otto Seeber. He's a callous and sneering manipulator that recognizes Maggie for who she really is. And yes, this malignant man-child gleefully sowing discord, feeding his own base self-interests, and inflicting pain also feels discomfortingly familiar.

What could have been deliciously spiteful instead becomes morbidly, shockingly dark. My body was not ready. And maybe this proved less of an escape from the current reality than I would have liked.