{"id":7737,"date":"2026-11-02T05:06:53","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T05:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7737"},"modified":"2026-11-02T05:06:53","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T05:06:53","slug":"the-last-days-of-vic-coco-by-taylor-jenkins-reid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7737","title":{"rendered":"The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Victoria Lucchese has been sent to find the forks. Instead she opens the wrong drawer in Leona\u2019s kitchen and finds the spices: coriander, oregano, marjoram, thyme. She knows from a library book that coriander is the seed of the cilantro plant, but she has never tasted it knowingly, so she unscrews the lid and smells it. The sage smells like chicken soup. Then she looks around the room at the four kinds of knife, the two sets of plates, the separate glasses for water and for wine, and understands that each one was bought on a particular day because somebody needed it and then kept. Vic is thirty-two, a pool player of genius and a professional hustler, and she has never owned a spice. The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid<\/strong> is full of cons and bar fights, but this moment, a woman standing still in a kitchen, is where the novel keeps its argument.<\/p>\n

The Hustle Is the Smaller Story<\/h2>\n

The premise sounds like a caper. In June 1974, Vic and her partner, Colette Wilson, drift east from Los Angeles in a light blue truck, sandbagging men at pool and lifting wallets between games. Coco has learned from a phone call that her past has caught up with her, and she wants one big score and a flight out of the country. In a small Arizona town called Canyonville she finds an old lover with money and a gambler\u2019s itch, and the plan takes shape.<\/p>\n

What makes The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid<\/strong> more than a heist is the way it keeps turning its attention from the scheme to the life the scheme is costing. Vic remembers her past by motel rooms: the bedspread where her nose first bled, the yellow-tiled bathroom outside Oklahoma City. Pulling into another lot, she stares at an empty swimming pool and imagines being a woman who owns a bathing suit and has so many towels she sorts them by purpose. Reid builds the whole book out of desires that small, and she is unusually good at making them hurt.<\/p>\n

Leona, the widowed owner of the Desert Willow motel, is the novel\u2019s answer to all that longing. She leaves sticky buns and strawberry crumble muffins in her office, has made an afghan for the foot of every bed and turns down the sheets for free because she likes a simple task. Coco bleaches highlights into her hair before a first date with the mailman. These motel scenes could have been sentimental, and in a lesser novel they would be filler. In The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid<\/strong> they read instead as a slow test of Coco, who treats every kindness as a mark\u2019s weakness until it starts working on her.<\/p>\n

Two Professional Liars in Love<\/h2>\n

The romance belongs to Tony, a card mechanic with green eyes and a habit of appearing wherever Vic is. Reid lets their courtship play out as a contest of tells. In his motel room he forces cards on her three times, then shows her how a perfect shuffle repeated eight times returns a deck to its starting order, and Vic, who expects every magic trick to disappoint once explained, finds him more impressive for it. The question they keep asking each other is whether one liar can ever stop working another, and the novel gives it a frank, adult answer.<\/p>\n

Still, the love story in The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid<\/strong> is the friendship. Coco apologises to no one on earth except Vic, and only without words, through a can of Coke or a souvenir penny left on a pillow. Vic, who has spotted every lie Coco tells about her age and her childhood, decides they do not matter. Readers of Reid will recognise the shape: a woman whose deepest attachment is the one the world has no word for.<\/p>\n

The summer itself works as a countdown. The Supreme Court rules on the White House tapes, the transcripts appear, and the headlines keep dropping toward August, so the national story of a crook running out of road shadows the private one. It is an elegant device, and Reid never leans on it too hard.<\/p>\n

What the Last Days of Vic & Coco Hold Back<\/h2>\n

The trouble with The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid<\/strong> comes in its final movement. To protect its biggest turns, the novel withholds what certain characters know and lets the reader believe something it later revises in a flashback. The first time, the reveal lands like a good con. On reflection it feels like a trick played on the audience rather than within the story, and one outcome a reader has every reason to care about is implied rather than shown.<\/p>\n

The forces chasing the women are also much thinner than the women themselves. The men who threaten them are sketched in a few lines, and the way they connect is revealed late and all at once, which strains belief in a book whose heroines read strangers for a living. Readers should know that the novel includes beatings, guns, police corruption, child neglect and a parent\u2019s addiction in backstory, misogyny, heavy drinking and near-constant profanity, with sex that stays brief and off the page.<\/p>\n

Where the Last Days of Vic & Coco Came From<\/h2>\n

Reid made her name with a run of novels about famous women in California: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo<\/a>, Daisy Jones & The Six, Malibu Rising<\/a> and Carrie Soto Is Back<\/a>, which closed the set in 2022 and is in development at Netflix with Serena Williams attached as an executive producer. Malibu Rising is being adapted for Hulu. After that quartet she went to space for Atmosphere, and now she has gone to the desert, trading celebrity for two women whose fame is a nickname whispered in bars.<\/p>\n

The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid<\/strong> marks a return to Atria and a reunion with the editor Peter Borland, and the acknowledgments in the advance copy credit her agent with teaching her to shoot pool. The novel is dedicated to the people she would die for, a phrase that turns out to describe its plot rather neatly. Much of it unfolds on and around Route 66<\/a>, the highway Steinbeck called the road of flight, which Vic keeps tracing on the map toward Chicago.<\/p>\n

Readers who want more should go back to Evelyn Hugo, whose heroine also invents herself and lies to everyone except the person she loves. Malibu Rising offers another family made under pressure in a single season. And Addie Pray by Joe David Brown, the novel behind the film Paper Moon, remains the great Depression-era story of a grifter and the girl who becomes his partner across the American South.<\/p>\n

What It Leaves Behind<\/h2>\n

The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid<\/strong> hides its best ideas inside its smallest scenes: a spice drawer, a souvenir penny, a muffin a lonely woman does not dare to take. Its final act plays one trick too many on the reader, and its villains are cut-outs. What remains is a portrait of two women who would rather go to ground together than be safe apart, and of the price of that loyalty. It is out on 2 March 2027, and this review is based on an advance copy, so the finished text may differ. Expect to want a kitchen of your own by the end.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victoria Lucchese has been sent to find the forks. Instead she opens the wrong drawer in Leona\u2019s kitchen and finds the spices: coriander, oregano, marjoram, thyme. She knows from a library book that coriander is the seed of the cilantro plant, but she has never tasted it knowingly, so she unscrews the lid and smells […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7737"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}