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Hustle, Baby
From the incendiary voice behind
Your Driver is Waiting,
a fierce and unforgettable novel about a Tamil refugee family stealing from corporations to survive until their lives are up-ended by a day-trading scam, threatening what little security they have left.
It’s hard to be a teenager at the turn of the millennium in America, and especially so for Dilo, who’s always hustling to help her family get by. Since they arrived from Sri Lanka as Tamil refugees fleeing the civil war, one thing’s become blindingly clear—the American Dream is bullshit. The system is rigged, so sometimes you have to cheat to win.
Their family lives hand-to-mouth, always working for their next meal, until her aunt Anjali brings home her new fling, Mark. A day trader who promises them the world, Mark takes $50 from Anajali’s purse and turns it into $200 on the stock exchange, like water into wine. It must be a miracle, and the family quickly becomes enmeshed in his scheme, recruiting investors on his behalf, spreading the good word and the 10% profit. But when the bubble bursts, when Mark disappears, when Dilo ends up more betrayed than her whole family put together, she knows it’s time to take matters into her own hands.
From the acclaimed author of Your Driver is Waiting, with “a ferocity of voice that belongs to Priya Guns alone” (Camille Perri, NYTBR), Hustle, Baby is a fearless and feral novel about an unhinged anti-hero with a score to settle, who will stop at nothing for revenge and redemption.
It’s hard to be a teenager at the turn of the millennium in America, and especially so for Dilo, who’s always hustling to help her family get by. Since they arrived from Sri Lanka as Tamil refugees fleeing the civil war, one thing’s become blindingly clear—the American Dream is bullshit. The system is rigged, so sometimes you have to cheat to win.
Their family lives hand-to-mouth, always working for their next meal, until her aunt Anjali brings home her new fling, Mark. A day trader who promises them the world, Mark takes $50 from Anajali’s purse and turns it into $200 on the stock exchange, like water into wine. It must be a miracle, and the family quickly becomes enmeshed in his scheme, recruiting investors on his behalf, spreading the good word and the 10% profit. But when the bubble bursts, when Mark disappears, when Dilo ends up more betrayed than her whole family put together, she knows it’s time to take matters into her own hands.
From the acclaimed author of Your Driver is Waiting, with “a ferocity of voice that belongs to Priya Guns alone” (Camille Perri, NYTBR), Hustle, Baby is a fearless and feral novel about an unhinged anti-hero with a score to settle, who will stop at nothing for revenge and redemption.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published July 14, 2026
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July 19, 2026
Register Candy, Baptized Risk, and a Case File With Dimples
Priya Guns’s “Hustle, Baby” is a profane, crowded, morally dirty novel about scams that arrive wearing the face of care.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | July 19th, 2026
Dilo stands at the retail threshold where aisle, register, sensor, and hunger become a private education in watching, wanting, and learning how not to be caught.
Discount abundance is the first con in Priya Guns’s “Hustle, Baby.” Zellers opens the novel not as a store but as a finishing school for suspicion: cameras blinking, credit cards pushed with the cheer of register candy, free samples circulating as store-bought kindness with a barcode tucked underneath. Dilo, a Tamil refugee teenager in turn-of-the-millennium Scarborough, moves through the aisles with Mary, Anji, and little Maysha, reading the place the way other children read assigned novels. Where is the guard looking? Which shopper can be made useful? What fits under a coat? How can hunger pass through a sensor without making a sound? Before the book introduces its larger racket, it has already shown the showroom floor that makes scams feel ordinary.
Every room in this novel seems to know where the register is. Zellers sells plenty and shame. Fairy Kay sells empowerment by way of unpaid inventory and borrowed confidence. Church sells testimony, fellowship, and the particular pressure of being seen doubting in public. The early internet sells escape from the body, the house, the weather, the face one has to wear. Mark, the day trader who enters the household as rescuer, flirt, benefactor, and possible miracle worker, is merely more fluent in need than everyone else. He does not invent belief. He arrives after the training has begun.
Mary, Anji, Dilo, and Maysha are months behind on rent, living with the arithmetic of households for whom one lost job can become a rent notice, a kitchen trial, and a weather system indoors. Mary, Dilo’s mother, has faith, hidden gold, and a talent for saying dreadful things in the key of wounded love. Anji, Mary’s sister, has cigarettes, revolutionary memory, erotic bravado, and the bad luck to be both shrewd and susceptible. Maysha is young enough to treat chrome as revelation. Dilo, known at school as Hustle Baby, has built a locker economy of snacks, copied materials, DVDs, weed, and tactical charisma. She is a child, a merchant, a witness, and a little monster – nowhere near as invulnerable as her jokes would like us to think.
At the kitchen table, rent paper and hidden gold turn faith into something handled, weighed, and nearly spent before rescue has even arrived.
Enough plot can be sketched quickly; the racket shows its teeth early. Mark appears when the household most needs him to be plausible. He pays for groceries, lends Mary money, brings a computer into the home. He speaks church, talks trading, and begins turning small sums into glowing returns. Soon the family is helping him recruit investors: first the desperate, then the better-dressed believers at church. Meanwhile, Dilo is corresponding online with a man calling himself John Gotti, whose jokes and flirtations sour into pressure. The turn that makes the earlier comedy curdle is also the novel’s cleanest trap: the financial con and the intimacy con are not parallel dangers but the same danger in different rooms.
That is why “Hustle, Baby” is more dangerous than its neatest premise. It could be described as a feral immigrant-family scam-and-revenge novel, which is true enough and about as complete as calling a nail gun a household item. The sharper wound is that fraud imitates care. Mark succeeds because he offers each person a custom rescue. Mary receives providence with a payment schedule. Anji receives usefulness, heat, and leverage. The church receives a story of blessing. The investors receive proof that risk has been baptized. Dilo, through John Gotti, receives attention without witness, affection without consequence, and a version of herself that seems freer because it is unseen.
Recruitment, in this novel, changes costumes more than methods. The fictional Fairy Kay subplot, in which Anji tries to recruit women into a cosmetics business through fellowship and flattery, is not a side hustle of the plot; it is the first rehearsal. The room has mirrors, products, snacks, hope, and humiliation. Women are invited to see themselves improved, then invited to pay for the privilege of selling that improvement to someone else. When Mark later performs his market miracles for the Original Batch and then for wealthier churchgoers, he is working from the same script with more expensive lighting. The most efficient con does not ask people to abandon their values. It grabs those values by the handle.
Mirrors, cosmetics, chairs, and sample cards gather into the novel’s first lesson in recruitment, where hope begins to look like inventory.
In Dilo, Guns has created a narrator whose intelligence keeps one eye on the exits. Her mind works fast because speed is cheaper than safety. She insults because tenderness has a bad habit of leaving fingerprints. She notices bodies, brands, noises, prices, accents, stains, smells, and weaknesses with the vigilance of someone who has never been allowed the luxury of not noticing. The prose is profane, bodily, elastic, and overstocked: gum, cologne, acid reflux, nail guns, pomegranates, Krafty Kon, the blue-lit promise of screens. The book can feel like a discount aisle after an earthquake, except that most of the items are still on promotion.
Priya Guns’s sentences move by lunge, swerve, and sudden skid. Short comic punches give way to long runs of class nausea; bodily jokes cut into refugee memory; brand names sit beside prayer, war, and sexual humiliation without changing rooms. Dilo has the sharpest mouth in the house, but Mary and Anji are not chorus parts. Mary’s narration moves through translation, Christian faith, class memory, maternal cruelty, and genuine terror, often in the same breath. Anji’s voice is manifesto, seduction, grievance, and cigarette smoke. She is politically furious, sexually frank, and frequently ridiculous, a combination the book neither excuses nor tidies. Maysha’s few sections are brief but sharply placed: she cannot fully read words, but she can read logos. That may be the novel’s bleakest joke, and not its least accurate one.
A cleaner writer might have shaped this material into a tidier morality play: poor family against predatory man; immigrant aspiration against checkout cruelty; girlhood wounded, revenge delivered, invoice closed. Guns is after a dirtier and more interesting ledger. The family steals before it is stolen from. Anji manipulates before she is manipulated. Mary’s faith sustains her and leaves her available to anyone who can counterfeit providence. Dilo’s cunning saves her and corrodes her. The book refuses the bargain often demanded of refugee fiction, in which suffering must be washed, grateful, and safely pitiable before it is believed. Here, suffering shoplifts. It swears. It lies. It knows which receipt to keep and which one to lose.
Perhaps the most useful neighbors are “My Sister, the Serial Killer” by Oyinkan Braithwaite, for its domestic proximity to crime; “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga, for its class-conscious hustle and comic rot; and “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith, for immigrant-family sprawl under historical pressure. But each comparison gives out quickly. Braithwaite is cleaner, Adiga more parabolic, Smith more panoramic. Guns is grimier than all three, less elegant by design, more interested in the sticky overlap between discount retail, church fellowship, war memory, and a chat window that seems harmless until it has teeth.
A novel this electrically verbal also runs up a bill. “Hustle, Baby” is rarely dull, but it sometimes lacks air. Guns can be so eager to make the store, church, screen, and man show their teeth that she rings the alarm twice after the scene has already made the injury plain. The satire sometimes confirms the injury after the alarm has already done the job: products become counterfeit sacraments, churches become rooms where doubt looks rude, money becomes a trap with a promotional flyer, men become rescue vehicles with faulty brakes. All of that is persuasively dramatized. The book does not always trust its scenes to stand without one more joke, one more grotesque detail, one more raised middle finger with glitter on the nail.
In the congregation’s shared light, belief becomes public pressure, and the hardest thing to keep private is hesitation.
Dilo’s great antagonist is persuasive because his masks fit, but they fit almost too neatly. Mark must be day trader, false Christian, seducer, thief, groomer, benefactor, and, after death, a kind of corpse-saint in the story others build around him. The convergence lands because the same man who sells returns also sells intimacy, and the same performance of care opens every door. Still, so much predation gathers in him that he sometimes feels less like a man than a case file with dimples.
In design, too, the wager pays off: the four acts borrow the con’s sequence. Scarcity, seduction, proof, escalation, collapse, afterlife. The rotating points of view keep revising the ledger. Dilo sees tactics. Mary sees sin, providence, shame, and a God who may or may not be answering on time. Anji sees appetite, leverage, and the next angle. Maysha sees the display before the warning label. The chat logs are the receipts hidden in plain sight. At first, they seem like dial-up atmosphere, all handles and games and early-online unreality. Later, they become proof.
A screen lights the room like a false altar, turning numbers, faces, and need toward the promise that risk has finally become proof.
More quietly, the book’s strongest trick is spatial. The store, the church, the kitchen, the computer room, the trading screen, the investor meeting, and the private chat do not remain separate rooms. Each one teaches performance. Each one rewards the person who can read need quickly. Each one asks someone to believe before all the facts are in. When the John Gotti thread snaps into the Mark plot, the screen that seemed to open outward becomes another locked room. The form has not been loitering in the margins. It has been setting the trap.
Its ending refuses a moral rinse. Mark disappears with the money. Dilo confronts him. The house burns. His briefcase returns. The family survives, but not by being restored to innocence. They pay the rent and help convert Mark into a posthumous story others can bear to believe. At church, Johnathan “Mark” Barnes can become a man of God, a tragic vessel, a final miracle with smoke damage. The lie is obscene; it is also useful. That usefulness is the splinter Guns leaves under the nail.
The novel is set in 2000, but its unease has kept receipts. Its internet is primitive, yet the moves are familiar: a stranger with a handle, a private chat, a joke, a compliment, a picture, a pressure point. Its trading scheme predates newer miracle-return cultures, but the pattern is recognizable: proof without transparency, community without accountability, risk renamed opportunity. Zellers may be a period object, but the store’s logic has aged nicely, which is to say badly: surveillance wrapped in customer service, abundance arranged beside debt, childhood trained by mascots and coupons.
Rating it once, since numbers are cruder instruments than nail guns but sometimes less avoidable: 84/100, corresponding to 4/5 Goodreads stars. That feels right for a novel whose voice, trap-door design, and moral grime are memorable, but whose pitch and repetition keep it below the top tier. It is strong not because it is always controlled, but because its imperfect control is tied to what it knows. Pressure distorts form. A house this close to eviction does not speak in balanced clauses.
Of course, Dilo will test some readers. She is abrasive, obscene, ungenerous, too eager to wound before she can be wounded. But abrasion is not garnish; it is the blade she has been handed. She is not a lesson in resilience packaged for donor luncheons. She is a girl who has learned that charm, theft, rage, and theatrical intelligence are tools, and that tools do not become innocent because a child is forced to use them. Guns lets her be brilliant without making her admirable in the easy sense. That is a harder kindness than likability.
People in this novel are never allowed to keep their innocence polished for display. Mary can be cruel and still be terrified. Anji can be right about certain kinds of power and wrong about nearly everything in front of her. The church can contain real longing and still become a marketplace for fraud. Dilo can expose hypocrisy while practicing her own. Guns is not asking the reader to decide whether these people deserve sympathy before they deserve attention. Look first. Sort later.
One pleasure of “Hustle, Baby” is that its comedy has teeth but not, usually, contempt. The jokes are filthy, quick, and sometimes gloriously rude, yet they do not float above the characters. They come from inside the rent panic. A woman tries to sell cosmetics because December is coming. A child worships chrome because chrome looks like a future. A teenager steals because stealing is the only business class available after school. The humor is not a softener. It is a stress response with timing.
Under the revenge plot is a more painful question: what story lets a family keep going after the facts become unusable? Mary needs a providential story. Anji needs a tactical one. Dilo needs a story in which she has not been made small by what happened to her. The investors need a story in which they were blessed, not fooled. The surviving household becomes, finally, a back office for explanation. It has to. Silence does not pay December rent.
Late in the book, Dilo’s future position in Loss Prevention gives the novel its neatest and dirtiest reversal. The shoplifter becomes the watcher, but the store has not become righteous because she has changed sides. It is failing, and the people inside it are running their own rackets. The uniform is new; the weather is familiar. Guns refuses to let institutional authority arrive as moral adulthood. It is only another aisle, another camera angle, another way to know where the exits are.
One need not wish the novel tidier simply because its mess leaves fingerprints. Still, the best passages are not simply the loudest ones. They are the passages where the noise points to something exact: a mother’s gold hidden in a suitcase, a child fixed to a television, a congregation leaning toward easy proof, a girl at a keyboard mistaking distance for safety. In those moments, the chaos is not decorative. It knows where the valuables are kept.
So the last image should belong to Zellers, as it must. Near the end, Dilo recognizes an old authority figure on the wrong side of the sensor. The girl once watched has become the watcher; the store that trained her is closing; the hustle has not ended, only changed uniforms. Then the old order gives off one small, satisfying beep. For once, the sensor tells the truth.
A studio map of the cover’s color logic, translating plum into atmosphere, black and charcoal into structure, reds and creams into heat and glare, and yellow into the rare pulse of alarm.
Small studies searching for the review’s central image: a girl, a sensor, a register, and the store geometry that teaches suspicion before the larger scam begins.
The skeletal architecture of the final watercolor, with shelf lines, sensor posts, border marks, and Dilo’s angled posture still visible before the room takes on color.
A study of Dilo’s body as argument, finding the half-turn, raised shoulder, and alert imbalance that place her between being watched and watching back.
A trial edge of receipt tape, shelf labels, sensor geometry, and surveillance framing, using the cover’s color balance so the border contains the image without decorating it.
The moment the drawing becomes atmosphere, with bruised plum beginning to carry the paper while the store’s shelves, sensor, and figure remain partly open.
A hand-painted ledger of the cover-derived palette, showing not only the chosen colors but their duties: atmosphere, structure, heat, glare, muted support, and rare spark.
A placement study for the hand-lettered author name, book title, watercolor title, and underscored “demetri,” making the text feel built into the image rather than captioned after the fact.
A studio what-if that extends the same visual grammar across a full book object, testing how the review image’s palette and emotional architecture might inhabit cover, spine, flap, and silence.
A playful literary caricature of the author at the threshold of the book’s retail world, poised between receipt, mirror, sensor, and one small glint of warning.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
Priya Guns’s “Hustle, Baby” is a profane, crowded, morally dirty novel about scams that arrive wearing the face of care.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | July 19th, 2026
Dilo stands at the retail threshold where aisle, register, sensor, and hunger become a private education in watching, wanting, and learning how not to be caught.
Discount abundance is the first con in Priya Guns’s “Hustle, Baby.” Zellers opens the novel not as a store but as a finishing school for suspicion: cameras blinking, credit cards pushed with the cheer of register candy, free samples circulating as store-bought kindness with a barcode tucked underneath. Dilo, a Tamil refugee teenager in turn-of-the-millennium Scarborough, moves through the aisles with Mary, Anji, and little Maysha, reading the place the way other children read assigned novels. Where is the guard looking? Which shopper can be made useful? What fits under a coat? How can hunger pass through a sensor without making a sound? Before the book introduces its larger racket, it has already shown the showroom floor that makes scams feel ordinary.
Every room in this novel seems to know where the register is. Zellers sells plenty and shame. Fairy Kay sells empowerment by way of unpaid inventory and borrowed confidence. Church sells testimony, fellowship, and the particular pressure of being seen doubting in public. The early internet sells escape from the body, the house, the weather, the face one has to wear. Mark, the day trader who enters the household as rescuer, flirt, benefactor, and possible miracle worker, is merely more fluent in need than everyone else. He does not invent belief. He arrives after the training has begun.
Mary, Anji, Dilo, and Maysha are months behind on rent, living with the arithmetic of households for whom one lost job can become a rent notice, a kitchen trial, and a weather system indoors. Mary, Dilo’s mother, has faith, hidden gold, and a talent for saying dreadful things in the key of wounded love. Anji, Mary’s sister, has cigarettes, revolutionary memory, erotic bravado, and the bad luck to be both shrewd and susceptible. Maysha is young enough to treat chrome as revelation. Dilo, known at school as Hustle Baby, has built a locker economy of snacks, copied materials, DVDs, weed, and tactical charisma. She is a child, a merchant, a witness, and a little monster – nowhere near as invulnerable as her jokes would like us to think.
At the kitchen table, rent paper and hidden gold turn faith into something handled, weighed, and nearly spent before rescue has even arrived.
Enough plot can be sketched quickly; the racket shows its teeth early. Mark appears when the household most needs him to be plausible. He pays for groceries, lends Mary money, brings a computer into the home. He speaks church, talks trading, and begins turning small sums into glowing returns. Soon the family is helping him recruit investors: first the desperate, then the better-dressed believers at church. Meanwhile, Dilo is corresponding online with a man calling himself John Gotti, whose jokes and flirtations sour into pressure. The turn that makes the earlier comedy curdle is also the novel’s cleanest trap: the financial con and the intimacy con are not parallel dangers but the same danger in different rooms.
That is why “Hustle, Baby” is more dangerous than its neatest premise. It could be described as a feral immigrant-family scam-and-revenge novel, which is true enough and about as complete as calling a nail gun a household item. The sharper wound is that fraud imitates care. Mark succeeds because he offers each person a custom rescue. Mary receives providence with a payment schedule. Anji receives usefulness, heat, and leverage. The church receives a story of blessing. The investors receive proof that risk has been baptized. Dilo, through John Gotti, receives attention without witness, affection without consequence, and a version of herself that seems freer because it is unseen.
Recruitment, in this novel, changes costumes more than methods. The fictional Fairy Kay subplot, in which Anji tries to recruit women into a cosmetics business through fellowship and flattery, is not a side hustle of the plot; it is the first rehearsal. The room has mirrors, products, snacks, hope, and humiliation. Women are invited to see themselves improved, then invited to pay for the privilege of selling that improvement to someone else. When Mark later performs his market miracles for the Original Batch and then for wealthier churchgoers, he is working from the same script with more expensive lighting. The most efficient con does not ask people to abandon their values. It grabs those values by the handle.
Mirrors, cosmetics, chairs, and sample cards gather into the novel’s first lesson in recruitment, where hope begins to look like inventory.
In Dilo, Guns has created a narrator whose intelligence keeps one eye on the exits. Her mind works fast because speed is cheaper than safety. She insults because tenderness has a bad habit of leaving fingerprints. She notices bodies, brands, noises, prices, accents, stains, smells, and weaknesses with the vigilance of someone who has never been allowed the luxury of not noticing. The prose is profane, bodily, elastic, and overstocked: gum, cologne, acid reflux, nail guns, pomegranates, Krafty Kon, the blue-lit promise of screens. The book can feel like a discount aisle after an earthquake, except that most of the items are still on promotion.
Priya Guns’s sentences move by lunge, swerve, and sudden skid. Short comic punches give way to long runs of class nausea; bodily jokes cut into refugee memory; brand names sit beside prayer, war, and sexual humiliation without changing rooms. Dilo has the sharpest mouth in the house, but Mary and Anji are not chorus parts. Mary’s narration moves through translation, Christian faith, class memory, maternal cruelty, and genuine terror, often in the same breath. Anji’s voice is manifesto, seduction, grievance, and cigarette smoke. She is politically furious, sexually frank, and frequently ridiculous, a combination the book neither excuses nor tidies. Maysha’s few sections are brief but sharply placed: she cannot fully read words, but she can read logos. That may be the novel’s bleakest joke, and not its least accurate one.
A cleaner writer might have shaped this material into a tidier morality play: poor family against predatory man; immigrant aspiration against checkout cruelty; girlhood wounded, revenge delivered, invoice closed. Guns is after a dirtier and more interesting ledger. The family steals before it is stolen from. Anji manipulates before she is manipulated. Mary’s faith sustains her and leaves her available to anyone who can counterfeit providence. Dilo’s cunning saves her and corrodes her. The book refuses the bargain often demanded of refugee fiction, in which suffering must be washed, grateful, and safely pitiable before it is believed. Here, suffering shoplifts. It swears. It lies. It knows which receipt to keep and which one to lose.
Perhaps the most useful neighbors are “My Sister, the Serial Killer” by Oyinkan Braithwaite, for its domestic proximity to crime; “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga, for its class-conscious hustle and comic rot; and “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith, for immigrant-family sprawl under historical pressure. But each comparison gives out quickly. Braithwaite is cleaner, Adiga more parabolic, Smith more panoramic. Guns is grimier than all three, less elegant by design, more interested in the sticky overlap between discount retail, church fellowship, war memory, and a chat window that seems harmless until it has teeth.
A novel this electrically verbal also runs up a bill. “Hustle, Baby” is rarely dull, but it sometimes lacks air. Guns can be so eager to make the store, church, screen, and man show their teeth that she rings the alarm twice after the scene has already made the injury plain. The satire sometimes confirms the injury after the alarm has already done the job: products become counterfeit sacraments, churches become rooms where doubt looks rude, money becomes a trap with a promotional flyer, men become rescue vehicles with faulty brakes. All of that is persuasively dramatized. The book does not always trust its scenes to stand without one more joke, one more grotesque detail, one more raised middle finger with glitter on the nail.
In the congregation’s shared light, belief becomes public pressure, and the hardest thing to keep private is hesitation.
Dilo’s great antagonist is persuasive because his masks fit, but they fit almost too neatly. Mark must be day trader, false Christian, seducer, thief, groomer, benefactor, and, after death, a kind of corpse-saint in the story others build around him. The convergence lands because the same man who sells returns also sells intimacy, and the same performance of care opens every door. Still, so much predation gathers in him that he sometimes feels less like a man than a case file with dimples.
In design, too, the wager pays off: the four acts borrow the con’s sequence. Scarcity, seduction, proof, escalation, collapse, afterlife. The rotating points of view keep revising the ledger. Dilo sees tactics. Mary sees sin, providence, shame, and a God who may or may not be answering on time. Anji sees appetite, leverage, and the next angle. Maysha sees the display before the warning label. The chat logs are the receipts hidden in plain sight. At first, they seem like dial-up atmosphere, all handles and games and early-online unreality. Later, they become proof.
A screen lights the room like a false altar, turning numbers, faces, and need toward the promise that risk has finally become proof.
More quietly, the book’s strongest trick is spatial. The store, the church, the kitchen, the computer room, the trading screen, the investor meeting, and the private chat do not remain separate rooms. Each one teaches performance. Each one rewards the person who can read need quickly. Each one asks someone to believe before all the facts are in. When the John Gotti thread snaps into the Mark plot, the screen that seemed to open outward becomes another locked room. The form has not been loitering in the margins. It has been setting the trap.
Its ending refuses a moral rinse. Mark disappears with the money. Dilo confronts him. The house burns. His briefcase returns. The family survives, but not by being restored to innocence. They pay the rent and help convert Mark into a posthumous story others can bear to believe. At church, Johnathan “Mark” Barnes can become a man of God, a tragic vessel, a final miracle with smoke damage. The lie is obscene; it is also useful. That usefulness is the splinter Guns leaves under the nail.
The novel is set in 2000, but its unease has kept receipts. Its internet is primitive, yet the moves are familiar: a stranger with a handle, a private chat, a joke, a compliment, a picture, a pressure point. Its trading scheme predates newer miracle-return cultures, but the pattern is recognizable: proof without transparency, community without accountability, risk renamed opportunity. Zellers may be a period object, but the store’s logic has aged nicely, which is to say badly: surveillance wrapped in customer service, abundance arranged beside debt, childhood trained by mascots and coupons.
Rating it once, since numbers are cruder instruments than nail guns but sometimes less avoidable: 84/100, corresponding to 4/5 Goodreads stars. That feels right for a novel whose voice, trap-door design, and moral grime are memorable, but whose pitch and repetition keep it below the top tier. It is strong not because it is always controlled, but because its imperfect control is tied to what it knows. Pressure distorts form. A house this close to eviction does not speak in balanced clauses.
Of course, Dilo will test some readers. She is abrasive, obscene, ungenerous, too eager to wound before she can be wounded. But abrasion is not garnish; it is the blade she has been handed. She is not a lesson in resilience packaged for donor luncheons. She is a girl who has learned that charm, theft, rage, and theatrical intelligence are tools, and that tools do not become innocent because a child is forced to use them. Guns lets her be brilliant without making her admirable in the easy sense. That is a harder kindness than likability.
People in this novel are never allowed to keep their innocence polished for display. Mary can be cruel and still be terrified. Anji can be right about certain kinds of power and wrong about nearly everything in front of her. The church can contain real longing and still become a marketplace for fraud. Dilo can expose hypocrisy while practicing her own. Guns is not asking the reader to decide whether these people deserve sympathy before they deserve attention. Look first. Sort later.
One pleasure of “Hustle, Baby” is that its comedy has teeth but not, usually, contempt. The jokes are filthy, quick, and sometimes gloriously rude, yet they do not float above the characters. They come from inside the rent panic. A woman tries to sell cosmetics because December is coming. A child worships chrome because chrome looks like a future. A teenager steals because stealing is the only business class available after school. The humor is not a softener. It is a stress response with timing.
Under the revenge plot is a more painful question: what story lets a family keep going after the facts become unusable? Mary needs a providential story. Anji needs a tactical one. Dilo needs a story in which she has not been made small by what happened to her. The investors need a story in which they were blessed, not fooled. The surviving household becomes, finally, a back office for explanation. It has to. Silence does not pay December rent.
Late in the book, Dilo’s future position in Loss Prevention gives the novel its neatest and dirtiest reversal. The shoplifter becomes the watcher, but the store has not become righteous because she has changed sides. It is failing, and the people inside it are running their own rackets. The uniform is new; the weather is familiar. Guns refuses to let institutional authority arrive as moral adulthood. It is only another aisle, another camera angle, another way to know where the exits are.
One need not wish the novel tidier simply because its mess leaves fingerprints. Still, the best passages are not simply the loudest ones. They are the passages where the noise points to something exact: a mother’s gold hidden in a suitcase, a child fixed to a television, a congregation leaning toward easy proof, a girl at a keyboard mistaking distance for safety. In those moments, the chaos is not decorative. It knows where the valuables are kept.
So the last image should belong to Zellers, as it must. Near the end, Dilo recognizes an old authority figure on the wrong side of the sensor. The girl once watched has become the watcher; the store that trained her is closing; the hustle has not ended, only changed uniforms. Then the old order gives off one small, satisfying beep. For once, the sensor tells the truth.
A studio map of the cover’s color logic, translating plum into atmosphere, black and charcoal into structure, reds and creams into heat and glare, and yellow into the rare pulse of alarm.
Small studies searching for the review’s central image: a girl, a sensor, a register, and the store geometry that teaches suspicion before the larger scam begins.
The skeletal architecture of the final watercolor, with shelf lines, sensor posts, border marks, and Dilo’s angled posture still visible before the room takes on color.
A study of Dilo’s body as argument, finding the half-turn, raised shoulder, and alert imbalance that place her between being watched and watching back.
A trial edge of receipt tape, shelf labels, sensor geometry, and surveillance framing, using the cover’s color balance so the border contains the image without decorating it.
The moment the drawing becomes atmosphere, with bruised plum beginning to carry the paper while the store’s shelves, sensor, and figure remain partly open.
A hand-painted ledger of the cover-derived palette, showing not only the chosen colors but their duties: atmosphere, structure, heat, glare, muted support, and rare spark.
A placement study for the hand-lettered author name, book title, watercolor title, and underscored “demetri,” making the text feel built into the image rather than captioned after the fact.
A studio what-if that extends the same visual grammar across a full book object, testing how the review image’s palette and emotional architecture might inhabit cover, spine, flap, and silence.
A playful literary caricature of the author at the threshold of the book’s retail world, poised between receipt, mirror, sensor, and one small glint of warning.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
July 14, 2026
We follow Dilo, a teenager in the year 2000, who hustles to take care of her family after her aunt and mother have fled civil war in Sri Lanka.
I love the jarring juxtaposition of learning what the family was promised as far as the American dream goes in comparison to what they truly got. I remember meeting families like this, from war town places, that are so cautious and hesitant to trust.
The family eventually meet Mark, a day trader, and AOL chat rooms and the inclusion of the Internet/ mixed media also plays a pretty heavy part in this one. Despite its flaws, the tone is PERFECT for summer, and preferable for fans of Anna Dorn books with a touch of grit and temerity.
Thank you @doubledaybooks for the advanced copy. All opinions are entirely my own.
I love the jarring juxtaposition of learning what the family was promised as far as the American dream goes in comparison to what they truly got. I remember meeting families like this, from war town places, that are so cautious and hesitant to trust.
The family eventually meet Mark, a day trader, and AOL chat rooms and the inclusion of the Internet/ mixed media also plays a pretty heavy part in this one. Despite its flaws, the tone is PERFECT for summer, and preferable for fans of Anna Dorn books with a touch of grit and temerity.
Thank you @doubledaybooks for the advanced copy. All opinions are entirely my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
There were lots of elements about this story that really stuck with me: the commentary on being refugees in a country that’s built on capitalism, the struggles of being a single mother, grappling with faith and trying desperately the find community. It’s very exposition heavy and some background info is very vague or minimally explored, like Dilo’s father and even their past in Sri Lanka. It’s very much like the musical RENT where you are thrown into the lives of these people on the day they are told they owe $5000 to their landlord and we see their story from THERE, with small glimpses into the past. Unfortunately, this was not as action heavy as I expected it to be, which is not the author’s fault but rather what I assumed from the back cover blurb. Regardless, I know many people who will love this character driven satire.
Slight spoilers ahead but nothing huge, just examining some casual colorism, my thoughts on slut shaming a 15 yr old and why I disliked the use of a slur when it was supposed to be used to “make a point”:
While I know that all cultures are different and discipline is different to each person, but the amount of slut shaming they do made it less enjoyable for me. It would be one thing if they just did it to Anji, a grown woman, but it spreads to Dilo. It especially hurt when the name calling and slut shaming came FROM Anji. I expected better from Anji, being a “freedom fighter” that wanted to support refugee girls and humanitarian causes. But as soon as a man comes into the picture she’s calling a 15 year old a slut… They also talk constantly about how ugly Dilo is, but that can be explained away as an example of how European beauty standards have permeated South Asia and caused lots of colorism and shame on things like body hair. What really felt unnecessary was Dilo’s use of the R-word (r*rtard for those who may not know, I do not condone its use but just so people are aware, it’s in the book). They wanted to paint her as an edge lord, but I think it could’ve been handled in a way that actually delivered extra commentary on the themes of the story. Dilo gets in trouble for using a word that is justifiably censored. Had she chosen to write about capitalism or beauty standards or immigrant struggles and been met with that same response, I think it would add another layer to the concept of the American Dream failing Dilo.
Slight spoilers ahead but nothing huge, just examining some casual colorism, my thoughts on slut shaming a 15 yr old and why I disliked the use of a slur when it was supposed to be used to “make a point”:
While I know that all cultures are different and discipline is different to each person, but the amount of slut shaming they do made it less enjoyable for me. It would be one thing if they just did it to Anji, a grown woman, but it spreads to Dilo. It especially hurt when the name calling and slut shaming came FROM Anji. I expected better from Anji, being a “freedom fighter” that wanted to support refugee girls and humanitarian causes. But as soon as a man comes into the picture she’s calling a 15 year old a slut… They also talk constantly about how ugly Dilo is, but that can be explained away as an example of how European beauty standards have permeated South Asia and caused lots of colorism and shame on things like body hair. What really felt unnecessary was Dilo’s use of the R-word (r*rtard for those who may not know, I do not condone its use but just so people are aware, it’s in the book). They wanted to paint her as an edge lord, but I think it could’ve been handled in a way that actually delivered extra commentary on the themes of the story. Dilo gets in trouble for using a word that is justifiably censored. Had she chosen to write about capitalism or beauty standards or immigrant struggles and been met with that same response, I think it would add another layer to the concept of the American Dream failing Dilo.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Hustle, Baby is a book that demands to be read in one sitting. It's about the stressors of capitalism on the vulnerable, and how sometimes the only way to exist inside the system is to cheat it. I loved Priya Guns first book, Your Driver is Waiting, and was stoked to get an ARC of this one.
If Your Driver Is Waiting was like the DeNiro movie Taxi Driver for the uber generation, then Hustle, Baby is the Uncut Gems of the AOL era. These are characters balancing on the sharp edge of a knife's blade, making risky and impulsive decisions that could cut them at any minute. This book follows a family of Tamil refugees, who may have left a war behind, but who are still struggling to survive under capitalism, with their landlord issuing final deadlines and ultimatums, and the ever-present threat of the security team at the book's knock-off Walmart catching them shoplifting food and essentials. Enter Mark, a fellow congregant at the church of born-again Christians the family visits, and his shiny new family desktop computer. Mark promises he can turn pennies into dollars through e-trading investments, and he *seems* to have the numbers to back his claims up. And, if he doesn't, who cares, seems like he at least is getting rich from this, somehow.
The book is a ride, for sure, and admittedly, the jacked up stakes and unapologetic tone made it a little hard to follow at first, but once I got it, I was in. It's a true microcosm of this exact period of history, where the new and largely unexplored frontiers of the internet meant there were loop holes enterprising hustlers could exploit that hadn't been closed yet. And the time and place - Toronto at the turn of the 21st century - was so well-rendered that it made this book about a family so different than mine seem nostalgic somehow.
Read this if you like strong family dynamics, morally gray characters, anti-capitalism, early aughts nostalgia, SCAMS and an ending that will have you saying "oh hell yeah" when certain people get what's coming to them.
Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!
If Your Driver Is Waiting was like the DeNiro movie Taxi Driver for the uber generation, then Hustle, Baby is the Uncut Gems of the AOL era. These are characters balancing on the sharp edge of a knife's blade, making risky and impulsive decisions that could cut them at any minute. This book follows a family of Tamil refugees, who may have left a war behind, but who are still struggling to survive under capitalism, with their landlord issuing final deadlines and ultimatums, and the ever-present threat of the security team at the book's knock-off Walmart catching them shoplifting food and essentials. Enter Mark, a fellow congregant at the church of born-again Christians the family visits, and his shiny new family desktop computer. Mark promises he can turn pennies into dollars through e-trading investments, and he *seems* to have the numbers to back his claims up. And, if he doesn't, who cares, seems like he at least is getting rich from this, somehow.
The book is a ride, for sure, and admittedly, the jacked up stakes and unapologetic tone made it a little hard to follow at first, but once I got it, I was in. It's a true microcosm of this exact period of history, where the new and largely unexplored frontiers of the internet meant there were loop holes enterprising hustlers could exploit that hadn't been closed yet. And the time and place - Toronto at the turn of the 21st century - was so well-rendered that it made this book about a family so different than mine seem nostalgic somehow.
Read this if you like strong family dynamics, morally gray characters, anti-capitalism, early aughts nostalgia, SCAMS and an ending that will have you saying "oh hell yeah" when certain people get what's coming to them.
Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
It is the year 2000 and fifteen-year-old Dilo AKA #HUSTLEBABY has perpetual acid reflux from managing household finances. While her mother and aunt rely on part-time gigs and pyramid schemes, Dilo sells contraband at school. To truly get by, however, the family has fine-tuned a shoplifting operation that somehow includes three-year-old Maysha. At novel open, the foursome is about to be evicted unless they can come up with five grand in the next two months. Enter mother Mary, a snake cast from paradise into the cold clime of Scarborough, who implores them all to find Jesus. They find Mark instead.
This ferocious novel by #priyaguns may feature impulsive characters and a hard-hitting plot, but I was most blindsided by the moments of sudden clarity; when Dilo realizes she is more capable than the grown-ups in her life...and revels in it. There is a moving passage about how an apple may not fall far from the tree, but if it was taken across an entire ocean, then it simply wouldn’t be the same apple anymore. It’s no wonder a waste man like Mark can come into their lives so easily, and with his suspiciously high returns on investment, the family of four dare to dream of doing something beyond just surviving.
Well! I didn’t plan on reading this summer release right away, but after taking in the first few pages I ended up finishing the whole thing! I love it when a book sneaks up on me like that. At once a tidy time capsule and yet very applicable to current events, this one is perfect for every millennial and resistance fighter out there. Thanks so much to @doubledaybooks and @netgalley for providing an eARC for review. #HUSTLEBABY comes out 7/14/2026.
This ferocious novel by #priyaguns may feature impulsive characters and a hard-hitting plot, but I was most blindsided by the moments of sudden clarity; when Dilo realizes she is more capable than the grown-ups in her life...and revels in it. There is a moving passage about how an apple may not fall far from the tree, but if it was taken across an entire ocean, then it simply wouldn’t be the same apple anymore. It’s no wonder a waste man like Mark can come into their lives so easily, and with his suspiciously high returns on investment, the family of four dare to dream of doing something beyond just surviving.
Well! I didn’t plan on reading this summer release right away, but after taking in the first few pages I ended up finishing the whole thing! I love it when a book sneaks up on me like that. At once a tidy time capsule and yet very applicable to current events, this one is perfect for every millennial and resistance fighter out there. Thanks so much to @doubledaybooks and @netgalley for providing an eARC for review. #HUSTLEBABY comes out 7/14/2026.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Priya Guns is a singular writer. Her voice and the worlds she builds on the page are unmistakably hers. I loved YOUR DRIVER IS WAITING and I could not wait to read HUSTLE, BABY. Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday for the DRC.
Fifteen-year-old Dilo (aka Hustlebaby) and her Tamil refugee family--including her mother, Aunt Anji , and young niece--live on the brink of losing their home if they can't come up with $5,000 in back rent. They are already living hand-to-mouth (literally) with their shoplifting scheme at a discount store. The first instance of the shoplifting detailed in the novel is a knock-out. Funny and suspenseful as well as brutally true in its observations--the author gives you no choice but to root for this family. Dilo is also a well developed character with bite, brains, and gusto. She is also an expert hustler.
When Mark enters the picture and pulls the family into his church as well as his own pyramid schemes, the family struggles. The story is set in the early 2000s and the author gives her current-day reader enough information to stay slightly ahead of the family. This creates quite a page-turner and it's hard to put this book down once you're a few pages in. Even as a reader who could see what Mark was doing, I was still surprised by some of the turns and twists in the novel. The end is very satisfying. It's hard to provide much more information than that without giving anything away!
YOUR DRIVER IS WAITING is still my favorite Priya Guns novel. HUSTLE, BABY is an excellent sophomore novel and I can't wait to see what this author does next. Priya Guns is definitely a must read.
Fifteen-year-old Dilo (aka Hustlebaby) and her Tamil refugee family--including her mother, Aunt Anji , and young niece--live on the brink of losing their home if they can't come up with $5,000 in back rent. They are already living hand-to-mouth (literally) with their shoplifting scheme at a discount store. The first instance of the shoplifting detailed in the novel is a knock-out. Funny and suspenseful as well as brutally true in its observations--the author gives you no choice but to root for this family. Dilo is also a well developed character with bite, brains, and gusto. She is also an expert hustler.
When Mark enters the picture and pulls the family into his church as well as his own pyramid schemes, the family struggles. The story is set in the early 2000s and the author gives her current-day reader enough information to stay slightly ahead of the family. This creates quite a page-turner and it's hard to put this book down once you're a few pages in. Even as a reader who could see what Mark was doing, I was still surprised by some of the turns and twists in the novel. The end is very satisfying. It's hard to provide much more information than that without giving anything away!
YOUR DRIVER IS WAITING is still my favorite Priya Guns novel. HUSTLE, BABY is an excellent sophomore novel and I can't wait to see what this author does next. Priya Guns is definitely a must read.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Hustle, Baby is a fabulous little novel about a family of immigrant women and girls from Sri Lanka living near Toronto. Hustle Baby is the nickname of Dilo, a rebellious girl who sees herself as a consummate con artist, selling stolen goods and drugs to her peers at school. Her mother and aunt also have their own money-making ploys, mostly involving shoplifting and pyramid schemes. The family meets a man who is figuring how to make money in the early days of the internet, and each has her own feelings about this man who infiltrated their lives.
The POV changes among Dilo, her mother Mary, her aunt Anji, and every so often, her young cousin, who is three and has little to say, but I enjoyed her inclusion as it highlights the different ways the family members react to their situation. Each character has her own sassy voice, and the writing is clever, fresh, and beautiful. The chapters are short and the book flies by, and I loved every second of it. I have not read the author's first book, but I am very much looking forward to it after having read this one. I am definitely a fan of Priya Guns now!
Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for providing a review copy in exchange for my honest opinion.
The POV changes among Dilo, her mother Mary, her aunt Anji, and every so often, her young cousin, who is three and has little to say, but I enjoyed her inclusion as it highlights the different ways the family members react to their situation. Each character has her own sassy voice, and the writing is clever, fresh, and beautiful. The chapters are short and the book flies by, and I loved every second of it. I have not read the author's first book, but I am very much looking forward to it after having read this one. I am definitely a fan of Priya Guns now!
Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for providing a review copy in exchange for my honest opinion.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
First, thank you to Doubleday for the galley!
I almost put this book away around 20%. I found the characters challenging to separate as the book just drops you right into the thick of it. The first few chapters provide a brief overview of each of the women but it took some unraveling. However, I’m glad I got past the hump as 70% of the book was enrapturing and a commentary on what people are willing to do to hustle.
Dilo, Anji, and Mary are refugees from Sri Lanka and must hustle to do anything whether it be eat, pay rent, or keep Maysha entertained. At the turn of the century with the Internet in its infancy, the hustle takes a whole new form.
When Mark comes into their lives, the women are exposed to what dangers truly exist and how people are willing to take advantage of the weak and vulnerable.
At the surface, this book can be viewed as satire but I think reading below it becomes clear that this is more identifiable for anyone who grew up in the early days of internet, exposure to always wanting more, or even those who enjoy the hustle.
This was my first Priya Guns novel and I hope to read more!
I almost put this book away around 20%. I found the characters challenging to separate as the book just drops you right into the thick of it. The first few chapters provide a brief overview of each of the women but it took some unraveling. However, I’m glad I got past the hump as 70% of the book was enrapturing and a commentary on what people are willing to do to hustle.
Dilo, Anji, and Mary are refugees from Sri Lanka and must hustle to do anything whether it be eat, pay rent, or keep Maysha entertained. At the turn of the century with the Internet in its infancy, the hustle takes a whole new form.
When Mark comes into their lives, the women are exposed to what dangers truly exist and how people are willing to take advantage of the weak and vulnerable.
At the surface, this book can be viewed as satire but I think reading below it becomes clear that this is more identifiable for anyone who grew up in the early days of internet, exposure to always wanting more, or even those who enjoy the hustle.
This was my first Priya Guns novel and I hope to read more!
July 15, 2026
Hustle, Baby is one of those books that sneaks up on you. I went in expecting something funny, but it ended up being so much more. It's a story about family, survival, and doing whatever it takes to make it through when life keeps throwing obstacles your way.
Dilo was such an easy character to root for. She's clever, determined, and always trying to figure out the next move to help her family. Even when she makes questionable decisions, you understand why, and that's what mades her feel so real. The family relationships are messy, chaotic, and sometimes frustrating, but they also have a lot of heart.
What I liked most was how the story balanced humor with some really tough topics. It touches on poverty, immigration, religion, and the pressure of trying to build a better life without ever feeling heavy-handed. There were plenty of moments that made me smile, but there were also scenes that really made me stop and think.
The writing has a lot of personality, and the story moves at a steady pace. There were a few places where things felt a little all over the place, but somehow it worked because the characters' lives are anything but predictable.
Dilo was such an easy character to root for. She's clever, determined, and always trying to figure out the next move to help her family. Even when she makes questionable decisions, you understand why, and that's what mades her feel so real. The family relationships are messy, chaotic, and sometimes frustrating, but they also have a lot of heart.
What I liked most was how the story balanced humor with some really tough topics. It touches on poverty, immigration, religion, and the pressure of trying to build a better life without ever feeling heavy-handed. There were plenty of moments that made me smile, but there were also scenes that really made me stop and think.
The writing has a lot of personality, and the story moves at a steady pace. There were a few places where things felt a little all over the place, but somehow it worked because the characters' lives are anything but predictable.
July 24, 2026
Actual Rating 3.5
This work of literary fiction focuses on a Sri Lankan family who is living in American in the late 1990s. Mother/daughter relationships are a focus in this one, as well as financial struggles, and faith. The coming-of-age aspect was also really well done, and the feel of the writing style almost made it feel like it was written as journal entries rather than a more narrative fiction feel.
The story is told from three POVs. Two of them were quite strong and added much to the story. The third felt a little redundant, since she was constantly present in the other two POVs and didn't have nearly as much going on in her POV. The book overall was heavy on the exposition and there isn't a lot of background given, so especially near the beginning of the work it can feel a little disjointed.
This was an interesting and odd read. It certainly won't be for everyone, but if you can connect with the characters, you'll probably really enjoy it. My thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for allowing me to read this work. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.
This work of literary fiction focuses on a Sri Lankan family who is living in American in the late 1990s. Mother/daughter relationships are a focus in this one, as well as financial struggles, and faith. The coming-of-age aspect was also really well done, and the feel of the writing style almost made it feel like it was written as journal entries rather than a more narrative fiction feel.
The story is told from three POVs. Two of them were quite strong and added much to the story. The third felt a little redundant, since she was constantly present in the other two POVs and didn't have nearly as much going on in her POV. The book overall was heavy on the exposition and there isn't a lot of background given, so especially near the beginning of the work it can feel a little disjointed.
This was an interesting and odd read. It certainly won't be for everyone, but if you can connect with the characters, you'll probably really enjoy it. My thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for allowing me to read this work. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.
July 17, 2026
*Hustle, Baby* is quick, sharp, and unmistakably Priya Guns. Her voice is direct and bold. This novel effectively captures the constant motion and pressure of hustling to survive in late capitalism. The family fled violence in Sri Lanka, seeking the American experience of religion and get-rich-quick schemes in the early 2000s. Dilo is a compelling protagonist — resourceful, observant, and easy to root for — and the family's diverse, quirky dynamics add depth.
Compared to *Your Driver Is Waiting*, this book feels broader in scope. *Your Driver* was tighter and more biting, while *Hustle, Baby* emphasizes schemes and collective struggle, making it highly readable and engaging.
It is a strong, confident follow-up that broadens Guns’s explorations — from individual alienation to family, community, and survival as a collective effort. Even if I slightly prefer *Your Driver Is Waiting*, *Hustle, Baby* affirms that Priya Guns is currently writing exciting, socially aware fiction. Thanks to Doubleday and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Compared to *Your Driver Is Waiting*, this book feels broader in scope. *Your Driver* was tighter and more biting, while *Hustle, Baby* emphasizes schemes and collective struggle, making it highly readable and engaging.
It is a strong, confident follow-up that broadens Guns’s explorations — from individual alienation to family, community, and survival as a collective effort. Even if I slightly prefer *Your Driver Is Waiting*, *Hustle, Baby* affirms that Priya Guns is currently writing exciting, socially aware fiction. Thanks to Doubleday and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
July 15, 2026
Mary needs $5000 to catch up on back rent or her little family of her teen daughter Dilo, her sister Anji and her toddler niece Maysha will be evicted. This family of Tamil emigres to Canada has dealt with death and war but now they've entered a new realm of challenges. Dilo is the Hustle Baby who is selling things to kids at her high school. Anji and Mary find themselves wrapped up with Mark, a day trader who you just know is running his own hustle on them as well as others. They regularly shoplift as a team to meet their basic needs. This bounces around between the women and dips back and forth in time a bit. Know that Tamil words are sprinkled throughout but that they are understandable in context. It's fast paced and occasionally a bit confusing but it's exhilarating. And the epilogue is everything. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Fans of Your Driver is Waiting will recognize Guns' distinct voice here and her pointed social commentary and satire. It's a great read.
March 2, 2026
I couldn’t put this book down and ended up finishing it in a day. I absolutely loved this family of Sri Lankan refugees and their dynamic.
The two sisters Mary and Anji are complex women trying to keep together their little family and make a better life for them. Mary’s teen daughter Dilo is a hilarious, sarcastic hustler who ultimately finds that she has to take matters into her own hands when the adults around her can’t manage. And boy does she step up.
Set in the early 00s, this book follows the family over two months as they face eviction and try to come up with rent money before meeting a “day trader” who seems to offer them salvation. It’s a story of family, community care, scammers and the scammed. I loved the sharp writing style and the unique characters.
I will absolutely be reading Priya Guns’ other novel now. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.
The two sisters Mary and Anji are complex women trying to keep together their little family and make a better life for them. Mary’s teen daughter Dilo is a hilarious, sarcastic hustler who ultimately finds that she has to take matters into her own hands when the adults around her can’t manage. And boy does she step up.
Set in the early 00s, this book follows the family over two months as they face eviction and try to come up with rent money before meeting a “day trader” who seems to offer them salvation. It’s a story of family, community care, scammers and the scammed. I loved the sharp writing style and the unique characters.
I will absolutely be reading Priya Guns’ other novel now. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Hustle Baby tells the story of Dilo and her family who are facing financial hardship and uncertainty. The family's determination and resilience shine through as they try to make ends meet in any way possible. There may be hope when they meet Mark, who shows them what a real hustle is.
The writing was excellent, with vivid descriptions and realistic dialogue that brought the characters and their experiences to life. Priya did a great job of capturing the emotional challenges of starting over in a new country through the perspectives of each character.
What made this book especially engaging was its ability to keep me invested in the family's story from beginning to end. The challenges they faced felt authentic, and I found myself rooting for them throughout the book.
Overall it was an excellent read! Would definitely recommend.
The writing was excellent, with vivid descriptions and realistic dialogue that brought the characters and their experiences to life. Priya did a great job of capturing the emotional challenges of starting over in a new country through the perspectives of each character.
What made this book especially engaging was its ability to keep me invested in the family's story from beginning to end. The challenges they faced felt authentic, and I found myself rooting for them throughout the book.
Overall it was an excellent read! Would definitely recommend.
July 23, 2026
Took a bit to get into with the multiple characters/POV and minimal explanation of their background but once I got into it, it was a fast-paced and interesting read and the ending exceeded my expectations. Still wish we got more of their history, I feel like I was missing something and there's plenty that isn't fully explained. But I would recommend if you enjoyed the style of Your Driver Is Waiting and novels about capitalism like Sisters in Yellow. Even Marty Supreme??
Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!
Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!
July 28, 2026
This novel is one propulsive hell of a ride. Guns’ prose is gritty and fast-paced. Peppered with Tamil words and phrases, Guns draws you into a world in which a family of Sri Lankan refugee women carve out whatever piece of normalcy they can in a culture where success remains just out of reach. Doing what they need to survive on their own, Dilo, Mary, and Anji are flawed—at times violent and immoral—yet highly lovable in all their messy complexity. Shaped by the violence they fled in Sri Lanka, this is a novel about finding your place in society when you have only yourself to rely on. I went into this novel blind and came out dazed and impressed with Guns’ sophomore novel. You generally expect the sophomore slump, yet Guns outdid herself in creating a story that is both unique and universal in its depiction of life on the margins.
July 27, 2026
3.5 stars
A family of Tamil refugees who fled civil war in Sri Lanka for the safety and plenty of life in Toronto find that immigrant dream is not what it’s cracked up to be. Just keeping the family fed and a roof over their heads is a terrible struggle, and the two sisters and their children are definitely in a tough place when they’re late with the rent once too often and the landlord issues an ultimatum. The tough voice of 15-year old Dilo ushers us through events, as she hustles one after another scheme to bring money in to help while she stays on top of her studies in her Scarborough high school. And then a pyramid scheming hustler insinuates himself into their lives. Things are looking up, no? No!
A family of Tamil refugees who fled civil war in Sri Lanka for the safety and plenty of life in Toronto find that immigrant dream is not what it’s cracked up to be. Just keeping the family fed and a roof over their heads is a terrible struggle, and the two sisters and their children are definitely in a tough place when they’re late with the rent once too often and the landlord issues an ultimatum. The tough voice of 15-year old Dilo ushers us through events, as she hustles one after another scheme to bring money in to help while she stays on top of her studies in her Scarborough high school. And then a pyramid scheming hustler insinuates himself into their lives. Things are looking up, no? No!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This book captures the complexity of single motherhood, attempting to build a village to help raise children, desperation to find financial resources - even running the direct marketing game, or any resources. How do you financially support your family successfully with so few hours to dedicate? Don't even get me started on lack of energy.
That Panic - who is taking advantage of my children and me? And Men's constant need to put their accountability on others, specifically women.
Taking what is Owed to You. Why do women always have to be so nice? They don't.
Guns capture my heard with Your Driving is Waiting - Hustle, Baby sealed the deal!
That Panic - who is taking advantage of my children and me? And Men's constant need to put their accountability on others, specifically women.
Taking what is Owed to You. Why do women always have to be so nice? They don't.
Guns capture my heard with Your Driving is Waiting - Hustle, Baby sealed the deal!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
thank you to netgalley and doubleday for this arc in exchange for an honest review!
1.5 rounded down
the premise of this book was really intriguing, but from the plot summary, i was expecting it to be more plot driven and action packed. instead, the first half of the book was very exposition heavy, revolving around introducing the characters. it felt like i was just waiting for something to happen. i also felt the writing was quite clunky and difficult to follow which further detracted from my experience as a reader. at the end of the day i feel like the book didn't quite deliver on what it promised and the execution fell flat.
1.5 rounded down
the premise of this book was really intriguing, but from the plot summary, i was expecting it to be more plot driven and action packed. instead, the first half of the book was very exposition heavy, revolving around introducing the characters. it felt like i was just waiting for something to happen. i also felt the writing was quite clunky and difficult to follow which further detracted from my experience as a reader. at the end of the day i feel like the book didn't quite deliver on what it promised and the execution fell flat.
Review of advance copy
Hustle, Baby follows the lives of three and a half women, each with a strikingly distinct point of view, as they navigate family, identity, and survival in the pre-smartphone era. Priya Guns captures their world with remarkable intimacy, offering a nostalgic yet unsentimental portrait of family life at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
While Your Driver Is Waiting was a tightly crafted page-turner, Hustle, Baby is more patient and quietly unsettling. It takes its time shedding its skin, revealing its sharpest truths slowly before finally sinking its teeth in. Strange, tender, and deeply absorbing, this is a novel that coils around you long after the final page.
While Your Driver Is Waiting was a tightly crafted page-turner, Hustle, Baby is more patient and quietly unsettling. It takes its time shedding its skin, revealing its sharpest truths slowly before finally sinking its teeth in. Strange, tender, and deeply absorbing, this is a novel that coils around you long after the final page.
July 14, 2026
I really enjoyed this latest from Guns! Set in the late 90s/early 2000s in a Toronto suburb, it follows a South Asian immigrant family hustling to make rent and stay in their home. Told from alternating perspectives we see how three generations of women in this family are working hard at their various side hustles only to get duped by a con artist who takes off with their money. Full of female rage, family drama and the same wry wit that I loved in her debut novel, Your driver is waiting. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early digital copy and @prhaudio for a complimentary ALC in exchange for my honest review.
July 8, 2026
This was a fast paced good read. This is typically not my style of reading however each view point kept me captivated. You have Mary who is super religious, Anji who has a young baby Maysha and is trying to also make it through while making many mistakes and Dilo who’s a teenager helping to provide for her family and learning herself. Then there’s the sleeze bag mark. I’m so happy it ended the way it did!
Did Not Finish
July 18, 2026Loved Your Driver is Waiting. This book has a lot more perspectives and I often found myself excited by some and bored by others. I don’t often care for ensemble character books so this one was probably just not for me.
March 30, 2026
Damn, this was so fun and VERY well done. A coming-of-age tale told from the POV of Tamil refugees escaping a Sri Lankan/Indian genocide - hustling to get by in Toronto as they risk eviction and getting by.
That is until they meet Mark, a self-proclaimed day trading wizard who swears he can turn a profit 100% of the time, but yall he’s giving white boy, Ponzi scheme, banking on the more vulnerable demographic.
In this rags-to-riches fairytale, our FMC fam-jam gets by with a quick sleight of hand, and a bit of trickery, but they really find themselves in a jam with Mark and his money hungry, born again Bible-thumping disciples on the prowl.
I am so thankful to Doubleday Books, Priya Guns, and NetGalley for advanced access.
This quickie is set to hit shelves on July 14, 2026!
That is until they meet Mark, a self-proclaimed day trading wizard who swears he can turn a profit 100% of the time, but yall he’s giving white boy, Ponzi scheme, banking on the more vulnerable demographic.
In this rags-to-riches fairytale, our FMC fam-jam gets by with a quick sleight of hand, and a bit of trickery, but they really find themselves in a jam with Mark and his money hungry, born again Bible-thumping disciples on the prowl.
I am so thankful to Doubleday Books, Priya Guns, and NetGalley for advanced access.
This quickie is set to hit shelves on July 14, 2026!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
3.25 stars
What a strange novel. While I loved the refugee hustle and coming of age plotlines, I'm not sure if I liked the writing style or overall story enough to recommend it wholeheartedly.
The prose was very straightforward and extremely blunt, which made for an easy read. It felt like I was reading diary or journal entries because the writing pretty much just explained what the characters said, thought, felt and did. There weren't any verbose or poetic descriptions of settings or situations; these were usually simple and direct.
Dilo's coming of age story was my favorite and imo, it was the strongest voice out of the three women. Her teen years felt so realistic. Reading about how she spent her time in school hustling for extra cash for her poverty-stricken family and then talking to a sketchy dude in an online chatroom made me simultaneously want to root for her and scold her in an older sister kind of way. (But then I'd be a hypocrite.) I also liked Anji's POV. It wasn't hard to feel bad for her as she fell deeper and deeper into her new man's con. I'm not sure if Mary's POV added anything unique since she was usually already interacting with Dilo and Anji most of the time.
While I enjoyed reading about this family's life, their wins, and their misfortunes, this wasn't really an outstanding read. At best, it was a mildly interesting novel.
Thank you to Doubleday and NetGalley for this arc.
What a strange novel. While I loved the refugee hustle and coming of age plotlines, I'm not sure if I liked the writing style or overall story enough to recommend it wholeheartedly.
The prose was very straightforward and extremely blunt, which made for an easy read. It felt like I was reading diary or journal entries because the writing pretty much just explained what the characters said, thought, felt and did. There weren't any verbose or poetic descriptions of settings or situations; these were usually simple and direct.
Dilo's coming of age story was my favorite and imo, it was the strongest voice out of the three women. Her teen years felt so realistic. Reading about how she spent her time in school hustling for extra cash for her poverty-stricken family and then talking to a sketchy dude in an online chatroom made me simultaneously want to root for her and scold her in an older sister kind of way. (But then I'd be a hypocrite.) I also liked Anji's POV. It wasn't hard to feel bad for her as she fell deeper and deeper into her new man's con. I'm not sure if Mary's POV added anything unique since she was usually already interacting with Dilo and Anji most of the time.
While I enjoyed reading about this family's life, their wins, and their misfortunes, this wasn't really an outstanding read. At best, it was a mildly interesting novel.
Thank you to Doubleday and NetGalley for this arc.
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