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Weft
It's been a year since Bridget and her teenage son have been home. Living in motel rooms, they now drive from shopping mall to shopping mall, posing as casting directors on the lookout for kids with star potential--that is, kids with parents too eager for fame to notice they're being conned. But on Halloween weekend, Bridget's pursuit of a mark leads them to a haunted house deep in a gated community, where her lies will endanger them both and threaten to extinguish any hope of returning home.
Weft unravels Bridget's twisting, furtive life with precision and dynamism. Kevin Allardice's prose is sensorial: It's vivid enough to touch and astonishing enough to quicken your pulse. Allardice has delivered a novel that will leave its crescent nail marks on us long after we've boxed up and returned our skeletons to the closet.
Weft unravels Bridget's twisting, furtive life with precision and dynamism. Kevin Allardice's prose is sensorial: It's vivid enough to touch and astonishing enough to quicken your pulse. Allardice has delivered a novel that will leave its crescent nail marks on us long after we've boxed up and returned our skeletons to the closet.
- GenresFiction
261 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 2023
2 people are currently reading
94 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 25, 2023
Weft is Madrona Book's debut release, hitting shelves this August. Nostalgically set in the 90's, it involves a con artist named Bridget who bounces around from motel to motel with her teenaged son. They haunt malls and small town festivals pretending they are casting directors for the upcoming star wars prequels, looking to squeeze some fast cash out of unwitting parents before moving on to a new town, for a new sucker.
The scam life seems to be working out pretty ok for them. That is, until her son Jake gets bored with his role and strikes out on his own, sinking his con claws into a kid named Caleb. Going along with it, even though she's not thrilled with the deviation from the plan, they arrive at Caleb's home to record him reading from the fake script. Only, Caleb and his family are in the midst of turing the entire place into a haunted house for halloween.
Bridget finds herself stuck there, quite literally, and is forced to come to terms with her poor decisions. Has she finally gotten in over her head? Will she make it out of the creepy house of horrors alive? And where the fuck did Jake disappear to?
Don't mistake this book for horror. The only scary things you'll find in these pages are the gross advances some of the men make on Bridget, lol. But the deeper we get into the book, the longer the latest scam plays out, the more we're asked to suspend our belief, and the more interesting things get for our con lady!
I thoroughly enjoyed this one and I think you will too!
The scam life seems to be working out pretty ok for them. That is, until her son Jake gets bored with his role and strikes out on his own, sinking his con claws into a kid named Caleb. Going along with it, even though she's not thrilled with the deviation from the plan, they arrive at Caleb's home to record him reading from the fake script. Only, Caleb and his family are in the midst of turing the entire place into a haunted house for halloween.
Bridget finds herself stuck there, quite literally, and is forced to come to terms with her poor decisions. Has she finally gotten in over her head? Will she make it out of the creepy house of horrors alive? And where the fuck did Jake disappear to?
Don't mistake this book for horror. The only scary things you'll find in these pages are the gross advances some of the men make on Bridget, lol. But the deeper we get into the book, the longer the latest scam plays out, the more we're asked to suspend our belief, and the more interesting things get for our con lady!
I thoroughly enjoyed this one and I think you will too!
November 10, 2024
This wasn't a bad book, at all. It was well written with amazingly fleshed out and realistic main characters. It just wasn't what I thought, wanted, or expected when I got it. I was looking for a "found footage" type horror story, and based on the cover and description I thought that's what this was. So, more an error in marketing than a fault of the author, I guess. Because of this I found myself constantly waiting for the shoe to drop, the action and horror to begin, but it never did since that wasn't what this was about.
August 11, 2023
With him, she was a parent; without him, she was just a crook.
Bridget and her son Jake are wandering from motel to motel, running a con on good looking teenage boys they scope out at Colorado malls in the 90's. Fleeing a mysterious mess left back home, the pair picks out their next sucker and entices them with an acting gig for the upcoming Star Wars prequel films.
One con gone wrong leads them to an elaborate Halloween party that they literally can't escape from, and Bridget is forced to face everything she and Jake have been running from.
Weft begins as a smart, nostalgic mother-son adventure and then suddenly drops you in a trippy haunted house with a dose of horror, while still maintaining its heart. You'll never predict what Bridget will do (or not do) next, because she has no idea, either.
I love reading about mothers who have no clue what the fuck they're doing, as I imagine that's the kind of mother I would be. Bridget reminded me a lot of Josie from Heroes of the Frontier and Jane from The Last Animal--loving mothers dragging their children with them while they spiral.
Thank you Madrona Books for sending me an ARC!
June 11, 2023
Thank you so much for an ARC, Madrona Books! This beautiful mother-son narrative asks who we really are when no one is watching and what happens when our true selves catch up to the lies we tell ourselves. The vignettes of recorded scenes that are interspersed between each chapter did a great job in building the central storyline and maintaining tensions. It was a stellar read!
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September 18, 2023This novel is incredibly hard for me to review, as it is so different from my usual genre or style of writing.
The story becomes more and more chaotic and unnerving as it goes on, and I really had trouble discerning what was reality. I kept wondering if the mother was actually hallucinating, and we would all of a sudden realize this was all a dream or imagined.
At first, it feels as though Jake is our unreliable character. But then, our narrator Bridget definitely becomes more unreliable and more unbelievable. She seems very unstable, she makes terrible decisions, and the whole feel of the story is “chaos”. Once they enter the haunted house, it was intentionally very stressful & chaotic, and I felt the gore & horror aspect was a bit much for me.
This novel is definitely made for those who like unique, abstract story lines, and who like some gore and creepiness. I can absolutely recognize the author’s talent for writing, and the creative passages of “film” in between chapters was an interesting touch.
The story becomes more and more chaotic and unnerving as it goes on, and I really had trouble discerning what was reality. I kept wondering if the mother was actually hallucinating, and we would all of a sudden realize this was all a dream or imagined.
At first, it feels as though Jake is our unreliable character. But then, our narrator Bridget definitely becomes more unreliable and more unbelievable. She seems very unstable, she makes terrible decisions, and the whole feel of the story is “chaos”. Once they enter the haunted house, it was intentionally very stressful & chaotic, and I felt the gore & horror aspect was a bit much for me.
This novel is definitely made for those who like unique, abstract story lines, and who like some gore and creepiness. I can absolutely recognize the author’s talent for writing, and the creative passages of “film” in between chapters was an interesting touch.
September 16, 2023
I honestly didn’t know what to make of a novel that starts in a mall. Panda Express? Sbarro’s? Surely not the stuff of fiction! Very quickly, however, I found myself laughing at the witty critique of middle America that lies at the heart of Weft. Malls, movies, fast food restaurants, motels, Halloween—no facet of American life is spared by this wry, funny novel. Motel laundry rooms are “terrariums of mildew that gobbled quarters and returned your clothes with someone else’s hair gnarled in the pockets.” The houses in a gated community “seemed assembled as if in architectural games of exquisite corpse: a miniature rotunda above porticoes with florid abaci, here a mansard window, there a ghoulish set of ocular windows.”
It is, perhaps, fitting for a novel that takes as its subject the absurdity of white suburban life to have as its protagonist a con artist. With her teenage son in tow, Bridget poses as a movie scout and lures unsuspecting young men and their parents into intricate scams that play upon their egos and their wallets. What makes Bridge such an appealing character is her uncanny ability to pick only the most entitled of kids and their parents as marks. She assesses one father as having “the confidence of a man who’d had an afternoon’s worth of wine and a lifetime’s worth of affirmation.” A page later, she says of the same guy, “anyone who cited themselves as a source of wisdom was an ideal mark.” You can’t help but root for Bridget when she tricks such a pompous ass into giving her money.
But what makes the novel more than just clever social commentary is the relationship between Bridget and her teenage son, Jake. The portrayal of the mother-son bond is complex and heartbreaking. I found it impossible not to love both Bridget and Jake, flaws and all.
In sum, this is one smart, moving novel. You’ll find yourself remembering it a long time after you’ve completed the final breathless scene. I highly recommend it!
It is, perhaps, fitting for a novel that takes as its subject the absurdity of white suburban life to have as its protagonist a con artist. With her teenage son in tow, Bridget poses as a movie scout and lures unsuspecting young men and their parents into intricate scams that play upon their egos and their wallets. What makes Bridge such an appealing character is her uncanny ability to pick only the most entitled of kids and their parents as marks. She assesses one father as having “the confidence of a man who’d had an afternoon’s worth of wine and a lifetime’s worth of affirmation.” A page later, she says of the same guy, “anyone who cited themselves as a source of wisdom was an ideal mark.” You can’t help but root for Bridget when she tricks such a pompous ass into giving her money.
But what makes the novel more than just clever social commentary is the relationship between Bridget and her teenage son, Jake. The portrayal of the mother-son bond is complex and heartbreaking. I found it impossible not to love both Bridget and Jake, flaws and all.
In sum, this is one smart, moving novel. You’ll find yourself remembering it a long time after you’ve completed the final breathless scene. I highly recommend it!
January 18, 2024
what an odd book
October 6, 2025
engaging and slight Gone Girl vibes. but also confusing and a little all over the place
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews