Granny Is My Wingman

Finding true love in the digital age isn’t easy—as Kayli Stollak can attest. Following the end of her four-year relationship, Ms. Stollak took her search for a new lover to the interwebs and created a popular blog to follow her sexual exploits.

In a twist, her partner in crime isn’t her BFF or her GBF, it’s her 70-something grandmother.

Over some 200 pages, Ms. Stollak details hookups, outfits, snarky comments, and bad dates in the Big Apple—all interwoven with the story of her grandmother’s past doomed affair and her own attempts to snag a big fish in the waters of Florida.

And that’s about it.

Though the blog might be popular, the novel is an embarrassing mishmash of clothing descriptions (“I wore a long, chocolate-brown slip that was completely see-through on one side . . . I almost didn’t notice or care that my nipples were on display.”), crassly described hook-ups (“Jose made sounds I’d only ever heard while on a safari in Africa. He was biting his lip trying not to come since it had been so long, and I was biting mine trying not to cry.”), and over-adverbed, over-dialogue–tagged, over-explained, over-the-top ridiculousness.

Ms. Stollak’s three-nights a week, $100K per year job as a cocktail waitress (or is she a bartender? They seem to be one and the same in this novel.) reads like a fantasy; the rest reads like an advertisement for the dating site, OK Cupid.

Far from the “wise, witty” woman promised on the book jacket, Granny acts approximately as juvenile as her granddaughter. Both are self-involved, both value appearance and money over any type of personality, both are irritating. It’s not a surprise that either woman was on the hunt; what is surprising is that they caught anyone at all.

Granny Is my Wingman could have been funny, in more clever hands (someone like Jen Lancaster, for example); unfortunately, rather than the “hilarious tour through the obstacles of modern love” promised by the book jacket, the reader is left with the sad, ultimately irritating remains of one young woman’s tour through the beds of New York City—and the disturbing image of a sweet old granny tagging along.