ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, Bloomberg, KIRKUS

“Ebullient . . . What [feels] new is the glitter and squalor and joy and exactness in King’s writing . . . It reads like sequential shots of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky. King has unfettered access to her mind at 14 or 15. Her ‘Ode to Warm Vanilla Sugar’ is in league, as coming-of-age essays go, with Nora Ephron’s ‘A Few Words About Breasts’ . . . Like Katie Roiphe, King arrives in praise of messy lives. Like Toni Morrison in Song of Solomon, she advises: ‘You got a life? Live it!’ . . . So winsome is the writing in Tacky that, most of the time, there’s no other word for it but classy.” —New York Times

 “These sharp, deeply insightful and laugh-out-loud meditations on modern Americana, from the Cheesecake Factory to Jersey Shore, add up to pop-culture anthropology.” —People

"Most writers are boring people. King, though, seems different: Bettie Page meets Carrie Bradshaw, if Bradshaw supported Bernie Sanders for president and sometimes wore an Old Bay-patterned bikini . . .  It’s in her writing about sex and sexuality where King’s voice really shines. I have yet to encounter another writer who has so neatly captured what it was like to be a girl during that reactionary cultural period in which I grew up . . . King writes acutely, and sometimes heartbreakingly, about her developing sexuality, the cues she took from pop culture about how to make herself more desirable for consumption . . . There’s much to admire—and, for a kind of pop-culture-loving millennial, it will hit all the right notes." —Wall Street Journal