Dr. Evil Does Event Planning! My Review of the Ridiculous "Party Girl" by Rachel Hollis

Actual rating: 1.5 stars.

I'm not sure why I continually subject myself to the crapfest that is chicklit.  It  could be because when the books are good--a rarity--they are funny, heartwarming and real.  This book was not such an anomaly.  The basic premise of this novel is so cliched. We have all seen the movie or read the book where the sweet, small town girl moves to the big, bad scary city.  She meets the boy of her dreams, gets steamrolled by the mean girl, and ultimately triumphs.  Done right, this plot can be charming.  I  adored Reese Witherspoon's take on it in "Legally Blonde".  Granted, Reese is an Academy-Award winning actress who has made a lucrative career out of being adorable.  (Ironically, her best roles--those of Tracy Flick and June Cash--didn't utilize her awesome powers of cuteness.)

The basic premise is as follows:  Landon Brinkley, a sweet, small-town girl from Texas moves to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams of being an event planner.   The author had a successful career in that arena so those parts of the novel have verisimilitude.  They are also the best parts.  Honestly, I would have loved a novel about all of the funny, ridiculous, and rewarding aspects of event planning.  Throw in a little celebrity tell-all and it would have been an orgiastic medley of guilty pleasures. 

 Unfortunately, the book was a vapid rehashing of  The Devil Wears Prada without any of the humor.  At least Andi in the aforementioned Devil was smart--Landon is like a cartoon Texas girl, complete with pink clothes and big hair.  She is constantly described as smart but continues to do ridiculous things.  She has no spine--she cannot even stand up to one of the assistants; but somehow she manages to defy her evil boss and start HER OWN event planning business.  Every aspect of this novel annoyed the crap out of me.

On a side note, if you plan to utilize Spanish in your book, please make sure it's correct.  There was one scene where Landon helps to placate an angry Hispanic client.  She rushes over speaking horrific Spanish and the guy is supposedly charmed.  Um, no.  Nothing was grammatically correct, the syntax was completely wrong, and the subjunctive wasn't used in two instances where it needed to be.  Hey Ms. Hollis--using a Spanish dictionary does NOT mean you can speak Spanish.  "Viejo" is the correct adjective when describing a person, Ms. Hollis.  But I digress.

Landon starts the job on her first day apparently hoping that being cute and Southern will excuse her lack of planning.  She has done no research on the company, Selah Smith Events, for which she is working as an intern.  She has read about the events in magazines but doesn't seem to know that the person who interviewed her is a male because they have only talked via the interwebs.  Really?!  That is the POINT of LinkedIn, for Cripe's sake.  She doesn't ask about the company dress code so she shows up for her first day in a completely inappropriate outfit. She doesn't think that L.A. traffic might be awful and shows up half an hour late for her first day.  Oh, and she doesn't call/text/e-mail her supposed mentor to let them know that tardiness might be imminent.  In any job I worked, that kind of inconsiderate offense would be subject to termination. 

While all of that nonsense suspends disbelief for anybody who has ever held a job, Landon's ridiculous naivete and milquetoast personality were so ludicrous and overexaggerated they were laughable.  We are supposed to fall in love with the character's innocence.  I wanted to tie her to a chair, duct tape her eyes open, and force her to watch increasingly shameful pornography until she grew the hell up. I grew up in a very protective family in a small town in Florida; yet I had more gumption and common sense at SEVENTEEN than this Southern-fried idiot has at twenty-fricking-three. 

Then come a series of ever-more improbable events in which our innocent (read: abysmally stupid) heroine [snort] stumbles her way from an internship at the company to a paid position, lands one of L.A.'s wealthiest and hottest bachelors, and defies her evil boss. She also manages to start her own company with NO CAPITAL based on her good relationship with one celebrity client and the aforementioned Hispanic client.  Because powerful Latinos got that way by handing over their business interests to half-witted white girls.

Oh, God--the Satanic boss.  Selah Smith, the eponymous head of SSE, is such a bitch caricature it makes my head hurt.   She might as well try to slay Landon and be done with it.  I mean, she does everything but rub her hands together gleefully and laugh maniacally. At one point, she actually says, "I will ruin you."  What are you, Ultraman?  You can't ruin me, you abominable tart.  I'll call OSHA on your abusive ass.

Landon is such a wuss that she allows this woman to treat her shabbily. Indonesian sweat shop workers would quit after this treatment, but our ridiculous protagonist continues along without a protest. Work on Thanksgiving with no prior notice and after booking a flight? Sure!  Break up with the love interest because you like him too?  Okey dokey.  Allow you to verbally abuse me and take credit for my work?  Yupper.

L.A. is such a tiny, podunk town that there are NO OTHER event-planning companies for which she could work.  And of course, no one else makes a fuss either.  I am not familiar with the vagaries of event planning; I'm sure it is stressful to the extreme.  However, Federal law does have limits on the number of hours one can require their employees to work.  You cannot expect me to believe that AN ENTIRE FRIGGING COMPANY allows this woman to get away with a reign of terror that makes Pablo Escobar look like a jolly uncle.

There was nothing in this book that was original, funny, or redeeming except the party descriptions.  If you like shallow, stupid MCs and trite writing, by all means, pick up a copy.

You'd think by now I would have learned my lesson with Chicklit.  Perhaps I am even more naive than I thought--I keep hoping to find the gem in the dung heap.  This book was not that gem.

Teenage Girls Suck. My Review of "Conversion" by Katherine Howe

There was a great deal to like in this book.  Ms. Howe is an engaging writer.  Her teenaged characters are neither Mary Sues nor stock archetypes.  The main character has normal adolescent angst with all of the accompanying insecurities.  While I was not in prep school like the girls in the book I could definitely relate to their problems.  The main plot of the book centers around a girls' prep school in Danvers (formerly Salem Village) Massachusetts.  During their senior year, a number of girls fall victim to a horrible illness in which they twitch, get uncontrollable verbal tics, lose their ability to walk, and even lose their hair.  The media has a field day with the St. Joan's "Mystery Illness" and theorize causes on everything from environmental toxins to the HPV vaccine.  Of course, because Danvers, Massachusetts is on the site of the former Salem Witch Trials, the implications of witchcraft are omnipresent.  This witchcraft subplot was my main issue with the book and one that prevented me from giving it a higher rating.

The academic pressure for the college-bound student is a very real bugaboo for any student in one's senior year.  The panic over picking the right school, getting good SAT scores, maintaining good grades and getting through the admissions process can cause anybody to go kookoo for Cocoa Puffs.  The book covered these topics admirably, and Colleen Rowley, the book's protagonist, was real and likeable with just the right touch of teenage snark to make her realistic.  The fact that the book was based on real events that transpired in Le Roy, New York also gave the novel a verisimilitude that it might have lacked otherwise. 

The main issue I had with the book was the whole Salem witchcraft red herring.  The historical flashbacks, while interesting, didn't ring true.  The speech of the supposed 18th century characters sounded suspiciously like CNN newscasters.    While I got the author's intended parallels--the author obviously doesn't have much faith in her readers' intelligence and spells it out for you--I thought it superfluous and detracted from the main plot. The only hint one gets of any supernatural hanky-panky comes at the end when the hypochondriac mother of the best friend intimates that, "My Emma's like me, you know..she's prone to spells."  This is after Colleen accuses her best friend, Emma, of causing the whole thing.  I suppose the witchery was inevitable given the setting, but it was distracting and poorly executed.  The ending felt a bit rushed, as well.  I got the feeling that Ms. Howe wanted to ascribe the mystery illness to supernatural factors and then changed her mind.

The novel is a fairly intelligent YA read with enough plot twists to keep mystery fans content.  The characters are realistic, if a bit stilted, but I chose to blame that on their New England WASP upbringing.  In all, Conversion is an enjoyable mystery novel that encompasses adolescent academic angst admirably. 

For the dead travel fast--A review of Bram Stoker's classic horror novel, "Dracula"

In some ways, the novel resembles little more than an epistolary Victorian sex fantasy.  Fans of "Twilight" will hate this book; that quality alone would sway my opinion in its favor. You could write off Dracula as a simple horror novel or attempt to compare Stoker's vision with other vampire novels. That would not be veracious to this novel, nor would it be accurate.

 Stoker's was the first popular novel of the vampire genre, and remains arguably one of the best. (Polidori's The Vampyre--a portrayal of the destructive genius of Byron--was the first.)   Stoker has managed to produce a novel that is simultaneously a masterful study of High Victorian morals and strictures; a horror novel in which good does not ultimately triumph; flawed protagonists and an utterly alluring evil.  This Dracula does not invite empathy, nor is he portrayed as misunderstood.  He is simply an ancient evil that will either destroy or be destroyed. Modern readers unfamiliar with the premise may find the Victorian formal language off-putting. However for those of us that grew up with a literary diet laced with large helpings of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser, Byron, and Tennyson Stoker's prose is clear and maintains a pace appropriate for a horror novel. 

For those of you that cut your teeth on such lesser vampire offerings such as Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton, this book may not be to your taste.  Stoker's vampire is not a sexy, well-dressed fop with a penchant for lace ascots and leather pants.  There is no doubt that Stoker's Dracula is a fundamental force of evil; yet he is also intelligent, passionate, and cultured.  Dracula is not the focus of the novel, but he is the force that propels everything in it.  The book is a classic in every way without emphasizing the stuffy, nauseating over-analysis that often accompanies that phrase.

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.)