This story follows Tony Vicar, a failed rock-star turned wedding DJ, just plodding through his life. Until one day when he comes across a fatal car accident and helps a woman who is barely clinging to life. Word quickly spreads of the vicar who brought the woman back to life. Vicar insists he did nothing but talk to her (and he isn't an actual vicar, that's just his name), but his protests cannot quell the rumors. Add in a lucky guess at a lottery ticket, an obsessed stalker, and a former exotic dancer and Vicar's life just gets increasingly absurd.
I wanted to like this book. The description seemed right up my alley with the promise of black comedy and the book tagline "the mildly catastrophic misadventures of Tony Vicar". But this missed the mark by a good margin for me. I did like the last 30%, but the first 70% was just not for me. There isn't anything glaringly bad about the book but it really came down to just being so boring that I can't really recommend it. It does seem to be the first book in a series and I'll consider giving the second book a chance because this had some good points but mostly hit way out in left field.
So what I thought this book would be based on the description and the tagline would be a series of sort of campy accidental miracles that would keep getting Vicar more and more attention that would eventually go to his head and then he'd have to come to some sort of realization that all this fame isn't what he wanted afterall and he'd choose to go back to his roots of what really makes him happy. And the skeleton for that story arc was in the book but it did not go anywhere. We know he's a washed up, wannabe rock-star. He's been a part of countless bands and cover-bands and is obsessed with music as only a musician can be (he reminded me a lot of Jack Black's character in School of Rock). He starts getting all this attention for this woman from the car accident and he initially shrugs it off. Then, there's an incident with him 'blessing' a lottery ticket and the fanfare increases. This was where I thought Vicar would have the fame going to his head a bit, maybe getting a little excited at the idea of having all these followers (even the stalker). However, he has his girlfriend and friends to keep him grounded and he maintains pretty much through the whole book that he's just a normal guy. And that last point is my main issue with the book - there was pretty much no character development. I'm pretty sure that anyone who would find themselves in their 5 minutes of fame would have some sort of development - maybe figuring out that they really like being in the limelight or maybe the opposite.
After the lottery ticket incident, I thought that maybe the point was that all these absurd things keep happening to Vicar and he sort of plays the straight-man to all the chaos around him. But even that didn't happen because most of the story was Vicar hanging out with his friends so we don't really see the people in the town getting all worked up over his 'miracles'. Also, there were really only 2 main 'misadventures' that amped up his celebrity status and they both happened pretty quickly in the book so I wasn't sure why the excitement of people was still so high at points. If anything, his girlfriend was the one who was outside any of this bubble and seemed to be pretty unimpressed. As a character focused reader, I can deal with a pretty low action, low tension plot if there's good character development or character exploration. However, I really didn't feel like there was any exploring done. At times, it felt like this book was just a list of things that happened to Vicar as he lived his pretty mundane life. Went to work, drove some deliveries, had a date with my girlfriend, those people were outside my house again asking for autographs, had a nice piece of pie for dessert. Everything was just monotone. And if this book was meant to be some sort of lit-fic exploration of one man's life, then the description is really misleading.
The last 30% of the book is where a lot of the consequences I was looking for came in, but they did seem to come out of nowhere. Since we don't get to see how amped up the Vicar fan-club is becoming, we have no idea what level of celebrity Vicar is achieving. Because of this, when the stalker plot line is introduced, it really felt like it came out of nowhere. I would have loved to have gotten a split POV earlier in the book with this stalker maybe as soon as the car accident happened and they met Vicar for the first time and just latched onto him. Maybe getting this outside perspective on the whole situation would have helped give the reader a different point of view that would then directly contrast Vicar's POV of just going about his life like nothing is really happening. When the stalker plot comes to a head, we do get Vicar thinking a little more about his impact on the community and how his 'miracles' have come across to people who really believe he can help them. So we get a tiny bit of character exploration, but it was too little too late for me.
I did enjoy the writing style and the dry humor throughout the book. I think Ditrich does a great job setting the scenes quickly and introducing new characters effectively with just a few lines. Ditrich really zooms in on a few key details that really give the reader a quick way to get an idea of what sort of situation or character we're meeting. I really liked Vicar's character and how 'over it' he is about a lot of things. He's set in his ways and he's a little grumpy which comes across in the humor style in the writing. This isn't a character who is really over-the-top in his reactions to what's going on around him. There were a good number of jokes and humorous parts that got a chuckle out of me but I love this dry humor style. I think other readers who prefer more amped up reactions or funny moments would find this, for lack of a better term, too dry.
Overall, this story had an interesting premise but the execution was not there for me. The book did end strong for me, so I'd be open to continuing if we get a second book. Writing style and humor were a win for me, but I found the character development and plot pretty lacking.
Thanks NetGalley and Dundurn Press for the ARC in exchange for review
Expected publication date is September 14, 2021.
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