Someone Get Me an Infusion of Brain Cells, Please. Review of "Confessions of a Beauty Addict" by Nadine Haobsh

So. Many. Errors.  Seriously, in order to calculate the sheer number of spelling and grammatical errors in the text I would need an advanced degree in higher mathematics.  I lost count after 15 in the first chapter. The author supposedly went to some highfalutin’ school.  Perhaps if she went to them with a copy of this book they could rescind her degree and she could get her money back.  

There are so many problems with this book, but the main issue I had is that the main character makes the Kardashians look complex and well-adjusted.  She is such an awful human being that I was actually rooting for her nemesis, a clichéd, trampy type named Delilah [insert retching noise].  I was praying that there might be a snappy surprise ending in which the bitchy Delilah cold-cocked our protagonist with the September issue of Vogue* and put me out of my misery, but no such luck.  

The main premise of the book seems to be an exposé of the smarmy payola and corruption of the beauty industry combined with a tired tale of a protagonist who loses everything and has to fight her way back.  Oh, and she might learn some stuff along the way.  The novel recounts the story of an up-and-coming beauty editor at a hip, flourishing magazine.  Suffice it to say, the author named her Bella.  [retch noise again] Really?  How subtle.  That would be like having a protagonist who sells barrels and naming him Cooper.  I won’t attempt more of a plot summary as there isn’t a plot of any substance or plausibility.  I seriously considered sticking this one in the “did not finish” pile.  I deserve a damn medal for competing it—it was that painful.  But that's me--I'm a giver, y'all.

The shame of this is that the author’s blog is charming, funny, and insightful.  None of those characteristics were evident in this mess of a book.  Please stick to non-fiction, Ms. Haobsh—or I will chase you down with the September issue of Vogue.

*For those of you not cognizant of fashion magazines, the September issue of Vogue is roughly the thickness and weight of a text in astrophysics set atop the Gutenberg bible.

If Preppies Are This Boring, I'm Glad I'm Not A WASP

A review of Mating Habits of the North American Wasp by Lauren Lipton

Chicklit is a difficult category to judge properly.  At its worst chicklit is formulaic, histrionic, and badly written.  At its best it is heartwarming, funny, and engages the reader with heroines that are fully fleshed and real.  

I must say Helen Fielding has a great deal to answer for—she is the one that got me interested in chicklit in the first place.  To wit, reading Bridget Jones’ Diary on an overseas trip with a girlfriend.  I was laughing so much in our shared hotel room that V. demanded that I read it aloud to her.  She too was hooked—we both read the book twice before we boarded our flight home to Atlanta.

Yes, Bridget Jones I can be shallow and silly and abysmally stupid when it comes to her dealings with the opposite sex.  Helen Fielding’s comic gifts allow us to see the ridiculous in her eponymous character but we embrace her anyway.  Bridget Jones is flawed, but she is authentic with her laddered tights, sloppy apartment, and lack of willpower.  Fielding has a unique ability to write comedy but allows the humanity to ultimately prevail.  The reader likes Bridget because of her shortcomings—not despite them.  

Chicklit heroines run the gamut of feminine tropes.  The worst ones are ridiculous paragons of womanhood.  These main characters are beautiful (but of course they don’t know it—disingenuous tripe); successful; often have a handsome (if bland) boyfriend; and of course the obligatory spunky BFF, sometimes with a second pal that is an archetypal gay man thrown in.  Frankly, no one wants to read about a girl like that, unless it’s to watch her get her comeuppance.  The second chicklit protagonist is the plain, often slightly chubby, feisty–and they are always feisty—heroine who manages to land the handsome hero.  While I love the idea that a woman can be of any shape, size, or level of pulchritude and still find true love, the tragedy is that so many of these novels are so poorly written that the relationship portrayed has no verisimilitude.  And does this mean that plain, shy girls can’t find romance?  How about the ordinary, pretty girls? Perhaps it’s my own fault for continuing to read novels in a genre in which I know the majority of books are awful.  So sue me for wanting a light, fluffy read with a happy ending.  Why do they all have to be so execrable?

To be fair, Mating Rituals of the American WASP is not terrible.  Ms. Lipton’s journalism pieces are clean and concise with an acerbic wit, so I expected the same from this foray into fiction.  Lauren Lipton can actually string a sentence together and at least utilizes proper grammar. (Although I could have done without her terrible poetry. But more on that later.)  The main premise of the book is that proper, prudish Peggy and preppy, stiff Luke throw caution to the winds one debauched night in Vegas and get married after only knowing each other a few hours.  The problem is—Peggy has a boyfriend. After years of dating and ultimatums, he finally presents her with a ring once she returns.

Peggy and her girlfriend own a moderately successful home and personal fragrance emporium.  However, their lease is up at the end of the year and their landlord has raised their rent on the premises so much that they consider closing. Peggy intends to annul her whirlwind marriage immediately, but fate intervenes in the form of Luke’s formidable dowager great-aunt, Abigail Sedgwick.  Luke is the scion of a once-mighty blue-blooded New England family, the Sedgwicks.  He is the last of the line.  Therefore, his great-aunt offers him a deal—stay married to Peggy for a year and they will inherit the gorgeous—if dilapidated—Sedgwick House.  Peggy realizes that she can afford to keep her store if they sell the house and split the profits.  Luke is a disgruntled financier and aspiring poet.  He wants to use the profits so that he can devote his time to writing.  Peggy therefore agrees to spend her weekends in New Nineveh, Connecticut with her legal-in-name-only husband.  They will pretend to be a happy couple in order to placate Abigail and get the house.

I suppose the author threw the poetry in there to make the romantic lead more interesting, but if you are going to make him a poet at least make him a good one.  I suggest Ms. Lipton read A.S. Byatt’s Possession for tips. While the poetaster love interest is annoying, the book’s main fault is that the protagonist, Peggy, in addition to being an unbearable Mary Sue, is also hypocritical and boring as hell.  Lipton tries to give her some interest by making her the nervous type.  Unfortunately, she just comes across as a neurotic fusspot.  While this trait could be endearing in the right hands, Peggy just comes across as sanctimonious and bitchy. 

She also seems genuinely surprised by the small town folkways of New Nineveh.  Peggy is a transplant to New York and has moved around her whole life.  Surely she would have encountered small-town living before this; instead Lipton portrays her as constantly amazed at how open and trusting these small town folks are.  She might as well call them hayseeds and be done with it.  She also spends far too much time explaining the vagaries of the Yankee—that Bloody-Mary loving, Ivy-League-educated, J.Crew catalog stereotype bastardized in every teen movie since the dawn of time. Her portrayals do not give them flesh; instead it sounds like she read Lisa Birnbach’s satire The Preppy Handbook and just stuck a bunch of the stock characters in there. 

 I think Ms. Lipton is trying to write a comedy of manners in her portrayal of the preppy snobs in the book, but she does not have Jane Austen’s formidable gifts at portraying the upper class.  Jane Austen would ridicule the gentry, but she also loved her characters; for example, even the Mr. Collins types, while ludicrous, were real human beings with thoughts and feelings.  These were just preppy cardboard cutouts.  (Flask and plaid clothes not included in this kit.)  

There are other problems with this book—the commitment phobic boyfriend is far too much like a smarmy cartoon villain to be authentic.  I kept picturing Charming in Shrek, which made me giggle far too much to take him seriously.  The best friend, the hippie parents, the bosomy, well-meaning outsider who befriends Peggy, and the sexy artist girlfriend were all stock characters straight out of Central Casting.  Even the single love scene is arid and flat.  If Lipton had gone more for a comedy of manners, this book might have succeeded.  If she had written straight romance, it might have worked.  I would have even preferred sappy romantic comedy to this.  The book suffered from a dizzying jack-of-all-trades mentality; Lipton tried to play with several genres and like the cliché, succeeded at none of them.

Review of "The Great British Date Off" by Sheila Brady

Just--meh.  I adore dry British wit, so therefore had high hopes for this.  Hopes dashed again.  If you are going to advertise comedy on the cover, make sure it's there.  There were also myriad errors throughout the text.  These mistakes could certainly be limited to the electronic version so I won't grind on about them despite the fact they annoyed the bejeezus out of me.  The main character was neurotic and dull and wouldn't shut UP about the fact that she used to be fat and plain until she emerged swanlike halfway through secondary school.  The fact that she is THIRTY YEARS OLD seems to have no effect on her whining about her life as a former ugly girl. The characters were wooden and stereotypical with all of the tropes thrown in for good measure.  The author also couldn't seem to figure out how to end the damn thing.  Frankly, a comedy should leave one feeling good about the ending.  I was just grateful that it ended.

Southern Gothic--My Review of the "Graveyard Queen" series by Amanda Stevens

Amanda Stevens is an engaging storyteller and the books kept me interested throughout the series.  The main characters were likeable and realistic.  This is an engrossing set of novels with a high creepy factor.  The paranormal aspect is insidious without being intrusive and does not edge into the horror genre.

The bad news--the author tends to skim over secondary characters, even if they are instrumental to plot denouement.  The endings on both the second and third novels felt rushed--it was as if she had an annoyed movie director standing over her shoulder telling her to wrap it up.

Ms. Stevens does her research--I enjoyed reading about the religion of Western Africa and the Gullah traditions. She also has either an encyclopedic knowledge of the unique flora of the Deep South or a good friend that is a botanist.  The serial killer in the first,the witches in the second, and the voodoo in the third were all mentioned, briefly investigated, and then abandoned. She has a marked dilettante tendency to forsake these subplots. This was annoying as she started to pique my interest and then left me hanging. For example, I wanted to know more about the voodoo aspects in the third book and the circle of witches in the second.  Case in point--how did Luna stay so young and gorgeous?  She touched on it in one sentence, but that was all.  How did Darius Goodwine get such a following?  What did he and Mariama learn about in Gabon? A little more information would have made these books outstanding.

The other annoyance I had--and this is petty, so forgive me--is that the author has a penchant for the same words and phrases.  Perhaps she was trying to give the character a unique voice, but it bugged me.  To wit, the word "niggle" was used three times (p.51, p.135, p.298) in the third installment and twice in the second.  Ms. Stevens has a formidable vocabulary--I mean, how many people use "diaphanous" in a book? It just seemed to me that she could have picked another word.  Isn't that Creative Writing 101?

My biggest contention is with the love story.  Ms. Stevens' normal genre is romance, so I would have expected better in that department.  Granted, I liked both of the characters.  Amelia is educated, sensible, and independent. She is pretty without being ridiculously beautiful.  Devlin is handsome, wealthy, and refined yet also epitomizes the Byronic tortured hero.  Yet these two never actually talk to one another. 

It isn't until halfway through the third novel that they have a serious conversation about their lives, yet Amelia keeps droning on how he is the love of her life before then.  I mean, he doesn't know that she can see ghosts?  This aspect is such a fundamental part of Amelia as a person.  Perhaps she was afraid to appear crazy in front of Devlin; but honestly, a girl as rational and educated as Amelia would be more pragmatic about his acceptance--or lack thereof--of this quirk. She doesn't know about how the deaths of his wife and daughter occurred, nor anything about the events leading up to it?  Really? They are supposed to be madly in love (read LUST) with one another yet they know nothing about the other.

 Amelia admits to having a weakness for Gothic heroes.  (Hell, don't we all?  Having a handsome, brooding man emerge from the mist is enough to set even the most cynical girl's heart aflutter.) However, she is 27 and intelligent--I would think she would know the difference between lust and love.  Yet she constantly harps on the fact that she will love Devlin forever despite the fact that she knows nothing about him other than rumors and hearsay that others relay.  Therefore, the love story felt forced.  

Despite these flaws, the novels were very enjoyable.  I stayed up well past my bedtime finishing all of them.  They are a great example of how a paranormal series can be intelligent, romantic, and scary without reverting to purple prose, melodrama, or stereotypes. (Take some lessons, Stephenie Meyer.  Or learn how to write.)

How to Write a Chicklit Novel in One Easy Lesson. Or, my Review of "Blogger Girl".

I am going to revert to full-on Southerner here and say that the author is cute as a bug.  She also seems genuinely bubbly based upon her responses to the bloggers that have reviewed her work.  While this incessant perkiness makes me want to smack her with Elements of Style and end my misery, I really can’t fault her for it.  After all, it’s not Ms. Schorr’s fault that I am a disgruntled wannabe writer.  I DID note some errors in the text; but that might have been the Kindle version.  So what did I think of Ms. Schorr’s latest offering, Blogger Girl?  It wasn’t as bad as some of the others in this genre; Meredith Schorr actually has a grasp of grammar and syntax and has a subtle wit. Unfortunately, the book did have many flaws which I will delineate here.  I am probably going to get vilified here—Ms. Schorr has a huge following.

The novel is based upon the premise that the erstwhile heroine, Kim, is a highly successful chicklit blogger; that is, she reviews chicklit novels on a blog called Pastel Is the New Black. She is trying to save the genre from complete annihilation from its detractors that claim the category is trite, bland, precious, and sentimental. The heroine even complains about the bad novels of this genus. Kim loves her blog, though, and spends a great deal of time at her “real” job at a law firm working on it.  Oh—and her boss is completely fine with it, too. This was the first point that got on my damn nerves.  

I worked at two different law firms.  Unless Kim is damn Superwoman with the typing skills of a cracked-out hacker, there is no way in Hades that she would have time to bust out book reviews and read the books in question all the while working at a flourishing law firm.  The author apparently works at a law firm, so I would have expected a much more realistic picture of a legal office. She must have a much easier nonexistent caseload than the attorneys for whom I slaved worked.  I can multitask like nobody’s business.  I am efficient and computer savvy, and I still was up to my eyeballs in motions and court filings all day long.  So either Ms. Schorr is a complete legal badass or she has forgotten how thankless and frenetic legal work can be.  Maybe her boss has taken it easy on her now that she is a successful novelist. Perhaps she gets no sleep.  Perhaps Ms. Schorr deviated from the hectic life of a legal secretary in her novel so that our heroine could also have a busy social life.  Whatever the intent, I just found Kim’s seamless double life difficult to swallow.

Kim is a bit shame-faced about her veneration of chicklit. Indeed, when she describes her blog to her crush at a post-work do she is discomfited, to say the least.  She valiantly defends her choice, of course, because the author wants us to know that despite her diminutive stature Kim is SASSY.  Jesus.  If she had mentioned how short Kim was one more time I was going to spew wee, tiny, petite chunks.  I get it—she’s short and her last name is Long.  Oh, the incongruity!  Mwhahahaha.  

Now here comes the conflict and the life lesson. (And believe me, Ms. Schorr is not subtle—it is spelled out for you.) Kim’s high school nemesis, a young lady by the name of Hannah Marshak, has written a highly touted chicklit novel.  Hannah’s agent OF COURSE asks Kim to review the book.  Ooh, quite the dilemma!  Does Kim refuse? Does Kim read it and give it a bad review?  Or will she stay true to herself and her beloved blog and give the book an honest appraisal?  

To be fair to Ms. Schorr, we all had someone in high school that we absolutely abhorred.  Honestly, for most of us, high school was the academic equivalent of waterboarding.  We all have someone that we would like to see get their comeuppance; but of course karma doesn’t work that way, more’s the pity.  I did empathize briefly with Kim as she described the petty games that the evil Hannah would instigate.  But then it just went on and on, and frankly most of it was stupid.  If Kim was THAT thin-skinned she should have been home-schooled. (Oh, and did I mention that Kim is short? Hannah picks on her for it all the time.  What a bitch—pointing out the obvious like that.)  Sheesh. I’m short too, for Pete’s sake and I got over the taunts about my stature in about the third grade.  Kim is twenty-eight and still won’t shut up about it.  When Hannah’s character finally does show up, at the class reunion no less, she is so flagrantly bitchy it’s comical.  

When Kim finally accedes to reading Horrible Hannah’s book, she is upset because it turns out to be great.  In the end, Kim stays true to her principles and not only gives Hannah’s book a fair review, but discovers her own literary muse and writes a novel herself. She also manages to win back the guy she loves because of course they fought when he calls her out on her dishonesty to herself.

This seriously starts to read like a bad rom-com movie script. Throw in the loyal and talented BFF, the handsome (if mind-numbingly dull) love interest, and the stoner ex-boyfriend for comic relief, and whammo!  The next “You Again”—coming soon to a theater near you.

The irony here—and I am positive it was unintentional—is that the novel encompasses all of the typical chicklit traits. I cannot completely blast Meredith Schorr, however; unfortunately, the very term “chicklit” has come to mean a book that is evanescent and insubstantial.  Ms. Schorr has better writing skills than most in her genre and her characters have marked flaws which lends a touch of verisimilitude. She does have a sense of the ridiculous and a gentle wit—there was a scene with a Karaoke bar and various ill-assorted coworkers that had me giggling.  Ms. Schorr stays true to the genre—it is an easy unprepossessing read with a happy ending and an amiable, if grating, protagonist.  Blogger Girl is the literary equivalent of eating a whole Cinnabon.  It seems sweet and delicious for the first few bites; by the end, you feel a little nauseous and slightly guilty.