Sarah O'Connor

“You have to stomp it all down. You have to bury it. You have to bury all the messy parts and let your bright parts shine,” (Hambrock 83).

Jessamyn St. Germain is a star, or she knows that soon she’s going to be one soon. One day she won’t just be an actor who occasionally books laundry commercials, she’ll be able to quit her job as an usher and be performing in musicals on Broadway. She knows she’s close when the theatre she works at holds auditions for it’s Christmas show, The Sound of Music, because the role of Maria is hers. Except that Jessamyn doesn’t get cast in the show, instead she’s assigned the job of childminder and must look after the kids playing the Von Trapps. But Jessamyn knows that watching the child actors is a test, that she needs to prove to the director how good she is at Maria and swoop into the role when the lead proves she can’t handle it. And it will happen, it has to. Stardom is so close to Jessamyn and she’ll do anything to finally stand in the spotlight.

I’ve been looking for books about actors and theatre so when She’s a Lamb! popped up on my radar it felt like an answer to my reading rut. And what a fantastic book this is! The comparisons to Mona Awad’s All’s Well, Ti West’s Pearl, and Ainslie Hogarth’s Motherthing are spot on. Hambrock juggles a a dark setting with appropriately timed humour while still managing to keep the stakes high.

Jessamyn isn’t a fun protagonist to follow. Hambrock did a wonderful job with her voice, but as a character Jessamyn is both delusional and determined. All in all she’s a pretty successful actress but is unable to find any satisfaction in her life until she’s made it in musical theatre, what she believes to be the only legitimate form of acting. It’s only when she can star and perform in musicals and reaches her imagined superstar status that she’ll believe she’s made it. And it’s hard to see her struggle with the reality she has and the dream she wants, the ways she convinces herself that things will be different. It’s also hard not to feel for Jessamyn on some level, who after struggling doesn’t hope that things will work out in the most dreamy way?

It’s hard to be inside Jessamyn’s head, but I enjoyed the ride. I had the plot mostly figured out but halfway through there’s a shift. Not a twist per se, but things become a bit clearer to the reader and less clear for Jessamyn. I finished the book late at night and I struggled to sleep over how upset I felt over some of the characters. I would have liked some things to be a little more relevant to the story though, there are a few characters who appear at the very beginning of the book and then at the very end. I’d forgotten them until they were reintroduced and think peppering them in even in small ways throughout could have help with that.

A hard and tragic story, She’s A Lamb! is a fantastic and obsessive story that I think artists, particularly actors, may find hits a little close to home in some sense. I adored this book and will definitely be looking for more from Hambrock!

Publication: April 8 2025
Publisher: ECW Press
Pages: 312 pages (Paperback)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Horror, Canadian
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤.5
Summary:

Jessamyn St. Germain is meant to be a star. Not an actor who occasionally books yogurt commercials and certainly not a lowly usher at one of Vancouver’s smallest regional theaters. No, she is bound for greatness, and that’s why the part of Maria in the theater’s upcoming production of The Sound of Music is hers. Or it’s going to be.
Jessamyn may have been relegated to the position of childminder for the little brats playing the von Trapp children, but it’s so obvious she’s there for a different reason — the director wants her close to the role so when Samantha, the lead, inevitably fails, Jessamyn will be there to take her place in the spotlight.
This must be it. Because if it isn’t, well, then every skipped meal, every brutal rehearsal, every inch won against a man attempting to drag her down will have all been for nothing.