review: smoke by meili cady

Reminiscent of The Bling Ring, Meili Cady tells how she got caught up in a life a drug smuggling in her entertaining memoir, Smoke. After finishing school in Bremerton, WA, Cady headed to Los Angeles hoping for an acting career. As is many people’s story, it was difficult for Cady to break in, but also difficult to find other work due to the recession. Cady’s naïveté (if she’s to be believed that she didn’t initially know about the smuggling), neediness for a friend, and desire to support herself lead to her downfall when she joins Lisette Lee’s crew. Although Lee claimed to have a fabulous life as a pop singer and heiress to the Samsung electronics company, it turned out she was moving marijuana from California to Ohio. Cady relates this story and other elements of her life in Los Angeles in vivid detail, but sometimes the story just seems too fantastical to believe.
4/5
Review copy provided by the publisher, Dey Street Books.