Shanna Mahin is a high school dropout with a fierce desire to overcome what her 9th-grade English teacher predicted would be a lifetime of wasted potential. Now that she’s achieved official late bloomer status, she’s been a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Norman Mailer Colony Fellow, and a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow, among others. Her debut novel is Oh! You Pretty Things (Dutton), a fast-paced and sharply funny work that dares to imagine what happens when we go over the top in a town of gilded excess. Jess Dunne is third-generation Hollywood, but her star on the boulevard has yet to materialize. Sure, she’s got a Santa Monica address and a working actress roommate, but with her nowhere barista job in a town that acknowledges zeroes only as a dress size, she’s a dead girl walking. Enter Jess’s mother—a failed actress who puts the strange in estrangement. She dives headlong into her daughter’s downward spiral, forcing Jess to muster all her spite and self-preservation to snag a career upgrade.
