I grew up during the 2000’s and was looking forward to having a few laughs over how kitschy that era is. I wasn’t expecting the book I ended up reading and it left me feeling lukewarm over the experience.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a free copy of this ebook in exchange for an unbiased review. .

I love, love, loved this essay collection. A must-read for recovering Cool Kids everywhere. Long live messy, earnest feeling.

I honestly skimmed read this when I realized this was not the kind of book I thought it was going to be. I thought this was going to be funny and sarcastic but it was the opposite. of funny. Not for me and cannot recommend.

Thanks to Netgalley, Rax King and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Vintage for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Available: 11/2/21

A fun and occasionally brilliant collection of essays. Like all essay collections, especially about nostalgia, it can be hit or miss. I found King's writing most engaging when the object of tackiness was the clear leading focus (I loved the ode to warm vanilla sugar scent). The last few essays are framed around her sex life with the tacky elements definitely still there but feeling more as supportive characters. It can feel repetitive and slowed down my reading. It also felt to me like King was rationalizing her sexual exploits repeatedly to herself or the reader which felt off with how unapologetic King is about everything else in the book. I'll admit my meh reaction to the second half of the book may be because I had less in common with those chapters than the ones on being a teen mall goth or watching antm. And she did make me cry over the Jersey Shore which is a sentence I never thought I would type. If you do have a deep love of the tacky and a connection to early 2000s manifestations of it, I think you will get more out of this book than if you don't, but it is well written and smart either way.

I initially picked this up book up based on its title and cover art. I honestly thought by the image of a lady in a martini glass that it was safe to assume that this book would be an insightful exploration into tacky and kitsch culture of mid-century United States. I was severely mistaken.

I began reading and discovered this book is actually a memoir of sorts, incorporating early 2000s pop culture in a manner similar to fellpw millennial Grace Perry's "The 2000s Made Me Gay." Despite initially being put off that the cover art doesn't match the era being written about, I gave this a chance because memoirs are my favorire and Rax and I are close in age.

I read patiently through the first half of the book, although I felt like King's writing style skips around somewhat confusingly, weakening the connections between her memories and the pop culture she is referencing. Some of my favorite essays from this book include Rax and her Dad watching Jersey Shore and tween Rax's friendship with the twenty something year-old neighbor man. Then came the second half of the book, which felt full of unneccessary recollections of her sexual exploits. We get it, you might have a libido and definitely belong in the subreddit r/ihavesex. I think King hoped that (over)sharing some of these memories would help connect the reader to her experience more emotionally, but I found a fair amount of the details to be gratuitous, if not somewhat immature.

I am giving this 2 out of 5 stars. I am interested to see how Rax grows as a writer. In the interim, I think the cover, title, and even the book's description are misleading and should be reconsidered before publishing.

I absolutely love collections of essays and memoirs where people write about the pieces of pop culture that were important to them growing up and made a huge impact on their life. In Tacky Rax King covers things that are seen as low culture or for people who have “bad taste.” This isn’t a snarky book making fun of these things and it isn’t overly intellectual, trying to analyze them as pieces of high art.

Tacky isn’t just a book of essays looking at pop culture, it’s heavily influenced by King’s own life and experiences with the pieces of pop culture that she’s covering. The essay about America’s Next Top Model is more about King’s best friend growing up and the magic of friendship between girls/women than it is about the show itself. Similarly the Jersey Shore essay is about her relationship with her father and their time watching the show together. I found all the personal touches and how she was able to weave her own story in with writing more broadly about the essay topics to be really moving. But I can see how readers who went into the book only wanting the pop culture talk & analysis might be let down by how much of the essays are focused on King’s life.

I didn’t start reading this collection thinking that essays about The Cheesecake Factory or Guy Fieri would make me cry, but here we are. This book just hit all the right notes for me.

A wannabe version of what The Anthropocene Reviewed already is but from the lens of adulthood and the various excursions that come with it, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer falls short of what the title claims it should be. Readers follow this periodical of Rax King’s personal woes and how “tacky” some of her favorite things are as well as how they relate to what she was going through in a certain time. Each essay isn’t so much about the thing itself, but about the way it makes you [honestly, just Rax] feel. King is obviously sex positive, and while there are no issues there, it should be mentioned that nearly every essay has to do with her misadventures into dating and capital-L Love. An opinion piece that could have done without some of the opinion and more of how the topics are tacky culture wise. I give Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer three stars.

Okay, I just have to say that this author pulled me in and kept me there with her first chapter about her obsession with Crred as a kid. And I’m not going to lie, I had to immediately go and watch creed music videos and relive the old days.
I’m a sucker for a good memoir and this was perfect and beautiful, slow clap for the author!

Rax King has elbowed into the world of book publication with a collection of essays that poke fun at the ‘worst our culture has to offer’ while holding a mirror up to some striking and painful truths about relationships, sexuality, commitment, death, and the difficulty of communicating love in an increasingly complicated world. But this mirror does best when it is masking the complicated nature of what makes life so complicated through the junk lenses of Sex and the City, Guy Fieri, Creed, Hot Topic and the American Shopping Mall, Jersey Shore, The Sims, and many more shout outs to pop culture kitsch. King’s voice swings from tragic, to sultry, to cute, optimistic, and everything in between as we stand beside her for some of the most important and dark moments of her life. The weight of her experience becomes disarmed in this way, and we feel like we are listening to that friend in high school that has no bones about letting it all spill out while she chain smokes and sips from the endless nips at the bottom of her handbag (if you’d call that old basmati rice thing a handbag).

My favorite essays of the collection were easily “It’s Time To Let Meatloaf Into Your Embarassing Little Heart” and her James Beard Award winning “Love, Peace, and Taco Grease.” King has her hand on the pulse of those of us who can’t seem to stare a tragedy in our life down without a good thrift store TV-VCR night and too-soon gallows humor that give those around us some pause about whether to laugh or not. Her essays have a heft to the prose that holds them up by offering her strength in sharing the heavy themes s we walk through the aisles of a dead Blockbuster video. Bad things happen, and there’s some real garbage out there that we love to listen to and read and watch when we make it through the other side. That old saw goes, ‘life is what happens when you’re making other plans.’ I think Rax King’s Tacky is a great collection about how life is going to happen to you the way it’s going to happen no matter how hard you try and how bad you want to make it work differently...but while it’s happening, you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think about that yellow mayo sauce escaping from the corners of Fieri’s maw as he bathes in the sweaty meat heaven of flavortown.

An excellent collection from the kitsch punk writer nonpareil. Look for it when it hits bookshelves on November 2, 2021 from Vintage.

i’m giving this three stars, which is extremely generous. my initial inclination was to give this two, but i did see my younger self reflected in some of the essays in this book, even though i didn’t particularly care for them.

the title of this book is misleading-it’s not a book of essays about culture but personal essays using pop culture as a lens for talking about personal experiences. the few essays that i liked-the ones about Creed, Meat Loaf, and the Cheesecake Factory-were good specifically because they focused more on pop culture phenomena and less on the author’s relationship with men, which is what this book is really about.

you know that time in your life when you think the most interesting thing about yourself is how much sex you’re having, who you’re having it with, and how you’re having it? now imagine that you’ve reached your 30s and still believe that and somehow got a book deal-that’s what this book is about, in a nutshell. these essays may be entertaining and/or insightful for the writer’s friends or therapist, but for a general audience they come across as shallow and self-absorbed. things that make for viral tweets don’t necessarily lend themselves to an essay.

i received a free ARC of this book from NetGalley.

Funny, hilarious, serious, sad, wild, mild, outrageous, melancholy, happy. Words I associate with "Tacky." Seems like a run of emotions that goes deep, a run that also goes the other way, starting with happy, melancholy...Many thanks to NetGalley and Vintage for the ARC and all the best to Rax King. Five is the highest I can rate it here, and "Tacky" gets my five, though it's really a 10 or more.

I think my frustration with this book comes from a case of false advertising. From the cover and blurb, I was expecting something way more generalized, a piece of nonfiction that incorporated both psychology and history to talk about the enduring legacy of (tacky) American pop culture.

And… that’s not really what this is. Does the book talk about pop culture? Yeah, but the content leans soooo personal that I might even categorize it as pseudo-memoir. In particular, King spends an inordinate amount of time on her romantic relationships with men, including tons of details on her sex life. I don’t mind this for a chapter or two, but EVERY chapter seems to circle back on a different sexual relationship, whether the man be a tween, a movie star, or a married man she’s having an affair with! It got old, quick.

You can combine this complaint with the fact that some chapters hit much harder than others. I’ve never listened to Creed or Meat Loaf, never watched Degrassi, never shopped at Hot Topic, never played the Sims. This makes it difficult to relate / care about those chapters. I did enjoy the Jersey Shore chapter, and the one on Cheesecake Factory.

I’m giving this two stars (and a very generous two) because I like to reserve my 1-stars for books I completely and utterly loathe, but would never recommend this book to a friend.

I voluntarily obtained a digital version of this book free from Netgalley and Knopf in exchange for an honest review.

"Tacky" by Rax King is a celebration of all things low culture. The author waxes poetic about her continuing love for the band Creed, discusses how she bonded with her dad over their mutual appreciation of MTV's "Jersey Shore," the catty girl fights on "America's Next Top Model," and how she definitely relates to Samantha more than any other character on "Sex and the City." She also shares her thoughts regarding shopping malls, frosted lip gloss (as seen in '90s and '00s teen rom-com movies), the store Hot Topic, and even Guy Fieri.

I was more interested in the author's thoughts on culture/society than her sharing of her sexual experiences (and by that I mean SO MUCH SHARING). It was just unexpected, I suppose, though I probably wouldn't have picked up the book had I known that before reading it. However, there was one extremely poignant paragraph about how being loud is a way for women to take up space in society, and that alone made reading the book worth it.

Overall, I liked the ideas but thought the oversharing (SO MUCH OVERSHARING) of her sex life was unnecessary, especially when related to some of the topics.

Tacky is a fun memoir for those who grew up in the 90s and came of age in the 2000s. Rax King writes a collection of essays connecting nostalgic pop culture and how it connects to her own life. This is a memoir that will have you laughing out loud, nodding along in agreement, and feeling for the author at the more touching, emotional moments. But mainly it had my laughing and relating to the author. This truly is for those who grew up in the 90s or if you didn't and want to know the pop culture milestones you missed out on, this is one to check out!

I adored this book. Rax King's sense of narrative is as compelling as it is tangled, and the snarled mass of emotions brought out the colors of humanity.

An entertaining collection of short essays about some of our most guilty pleasures (and displeasures). I enjoyed the author's voice, and found myself both laughing and sympathetically hurting during the various stories.

While I enjoyed a few "Love Letters" to Pop Culture circa the 2000s, many of the writing/experiences were lost in translation because I didn't have the same upbringing or experiences, so it was hard to see past the "tackiness" of some things. The way she feels about Creed is the same way I feel about Nickelback (I wrote it for prosperity now). But most of the time, the "love letters" felt more like diatribes to air dirty laundry or come clean but throwing in pop culture to make it worthwhile. I don't know, but the author's voice bugged more from 50 percent on. I enjoyed the first half more than I enjoyed the second.

I received an ARC from Netgalley and Vintage.

I'm only a few years older than King, so I appreciated most of the pop culture meditations that form the backbone of this collection. Some of them weren't as engaging to me, particularly towards the end (some seemed a bit repetitive in theme, if not overall topic); but overall this is a solid collection. I particularly appreciated King's discussion of Jersey Shore paired with her relationship with her father. I do wish she'd discussed race and privilege a bit more, though, particularly considering her focus on ANTM and STC...

The author has written a funny at times memoir which will definitely take readers back to the culture of the 90s. While I was probably a bit older than the intended audience, I could relate.

I read this in a day. I am not a 28 year old woman from New York(I was born in the Bronx) but I do love tacky stuff and through I’m generations removed from Ms. King, I really enjoyed this series of essays on the tacky. Not just about the tacky but how the tacky defined /influenced her during certain periods of her life. Never have I read a book or essays about the intersection on tacky(not trashy mind you) and the internal life. Neither have you. Read and enjoy!