Five-Star Stranger
A Novel
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
An exciting and “inventive” (HuffPost) debut novel about a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app—a place where users can hire a pretend fiancé, a wingman, or companion of any kind—who finds out who he is by being anyone but himself.
Would you hire someone to be the best man at your wedding? Your stand-in brother? The father to your child?
In an age where online ratings are all-powerful, Five-Star Stranger follows the adventures of a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app as he navigates New York City under the guise of characters he plays, always maintaining a professional distance from his clients.
But, when a nosy patron threatens to upend his long-term role as father to a young girl, Stranger begins to reckon with his attachment to his pretend daughter, her mother, and his own fraught past. Now, he must confront the boundaries he has drawn and explore the legacy of abandonment that shaped his life.
“A sharp page-turner about our culture’s commodification of everything” (Debutiful), Five-Star Stranger is a strikingly vivid novel about isolation in a hyperconnected world, and “what it means to love and be loved” (Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans).
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The personal disconnect of modern society propels Kat Tang’s perceptive debut novel. A man hires himself out as a “Rental Stranger,” doing gig work filling whatever role someone needs him in. His longest job has been pretending to be the father of a nine-year-old girl named Lily, but a new relationship with a writer client named Darlene threatens to unravel the fake life he’s built. Tang doesn’t give us a name for the protagonist, which makes sense in this context: The character hides so much of himself that even he doesn’t know who he is. But the melancholy is cut with humour through his sometimes ridiculous assignments, like babysitting a man on his wild night. Tang’s protagonist is stuck inside a fantasy world of his clients’ making, and when he’s forced out, the result is as jarring for us as it is for him. Five-Star Stranger holds a mirror up to the illusions we all create and then shatters them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tang's moving and offbeat debut revolves around a New York City gig worker who offers his services on an app called Rental Stranger. The 20-something narrator, known only as Stranger, takes on such roles as mourner at a funeral, best man at a wedding, and wingman for a pickup artist. Each time out, he strives to make his clients happy enough to give him a five-star review, and his peculiar backstory explains his diligence. After his mother's death 10 years earlier, he found purpose by visiting his nine-year-old neighbor, Lily, once a week and pretending to be her father (the real father doesn't know Lily exists). Stranger, who is still pretending to be Lily's dad, divulges this secret to a woman who hires him to help develop her novel in progress by playing one of the characters and peppers him with questions about his work. Tang makes hay with themes of love, attachment, and the desire to be seen, as when the narrator reflects on playing hide and seek as a boy: "The thrill of being undetected was paltry compared to the relief of being found." The result is a memorable character study of a man hiding from himself.
