I recommend with some conditions.
This may be a given, but there will be some spoilers for The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes in this review. I will try to keep them minor, but read at your own discretion.
This book is from the perspective of Wanda Jaynes. She teaches English at a Community College in Newfoundland and is worried about getting fired. One day, she goes to the grocery store to pick up some coconut milk for a recipe, only to be interrupted by a mass shooter. In this adrenaline-fueled position, our protagonist throws her can of coconut milk at the gunman's head, causing him to fall unconscious until the police arrive. Unbeknownst to her, this encounter was recorded, soon going viral across the Internet. This newfound fame is unwanted and unhelpful to Wanda, as the situation had caused her a lot of stress and bad memories. She also begins to get worried about stalkerish emails and the possibility that her boyfriend is cheating on her, leading to her becoming overly suspicious of others throughout the story.
As I am writing this, I am unsure of how I will rate this book. There were things I liked and disliked about it— the memes and Internet culture, for one, were fitting for the situation and entertaining to see. The style of writing was easy to follow, though the first chapter was a bit slow, and I could later read large portions without realizing how much time had passed since I began. The reader can really see the impact everything had on Wanda and, though I am not exactly experienced in the art of becoming a coconut-milk-wielding-grocery-store-viral-superhero, I feel that her responses were fairly realistic.
Over the course of the book, she becomes increasingly reckless and paranoid. She feels that the entire world is against her— people online who hate her for not being Christian, her boss at work who she fears might fire her, the weirdo writing emails to her, the police force for seemingly not helping with the emailer, her boyfriend for spending time with a female friend, the female friend for spending time with her boyfriend, the person who recorded the viral video for using it to gain fame and fortune, random people on the street for being so cavalier about the worst moment in her life, and so on, and so on, and so on. Everyone is looking at her as if she’s some kind of perfect and superhuman hero, and she knows she isn’t, and it is putting an incredible amount of pressure on her. And that is understandable. But she is not an incredibly good person. And that is partly what makes this story about a perceived hero interesting.
The thing is, despite what 90% of her in-universe internet believes, she is not the epitome of high moral values just because she threw a can. No, she is human, just like everyone else, and that brings with it complications, because she makes quite a few unethical and legally-dubious decisions throughout the book— as one example, she stalks someone and digs through his trash in an attempt to find out if he is the person sending her suspicious emails (spoilers: he is not), and she has some thoughts I am conflicted about after finding out both he and the shooter were struggling with their mental health. Another example is her going through her boyfriend’s phone without his consent due to animosity for and jealousy of him having a female friend that he likes to spend time with. Naturally, I view these things as distinctly bad things to do.
What all this ultimately means, I find, is that we cannot take what Wanda says at face value; she is an unreliable narrator due to her viewing the story through an unavoidable bias. If the reader completely understands this fact, using critical thinking to separate fact from fallacy, then I recommend this book. There are a couple of things I personally wasn’t a fan of, like Wanda’s somewhat negative judgement of those struggling with their mental health and the slightly awkward sex scene, but I did enjoy several other parts of the book (for example, the scene with her changing stations on the radio only for all of them to involve guns and death was as amusing for me as it was distressing for Wanda. Is it unethical for me to find that humorous? If so, I’ve demonstrated that others have done worse).
Taking everything into account, I will rate this book 3.5 out of 5 stars (I put 3 above, as the website does not have partial stars). There are good and bad parts to it, like all books, but I believe reading it was a positive experience for me.
