Romance fiction right on target for rocker girls with a little therapy under their belts.
Engaging debut about death, modern romance, and growing up.
Junie, 25 and directionless, has yet to find herself and can’t quite embrace the good times with devoted live-in boyfriend Leon, a drummer who secretly dreams of leaving NYC with her to start a family and a restaurant in a small town. Junie fantasizes instead about Eliot, an embittered, middle-aged writer whose greatest success, a soft-core SF novel, is more than 20 years behind him. She perceives Elliot as potentially life-changing, while he’s just looking for his latest muse/plaything. Startlingly, while they carry on their flirtation, Eliot’s cat Alfie recognizes Junie as his soulmate from a past life; trapped in a feline body, he narrates his tragicomic frustration as he tries to be seen, win her back, and warn her away from Eliot. Following the affair’s anticlimactic consummation, Junie turns to her real issues: she cannot move past the death of her little brother when she was eight and needs to confront her parents about screwing her up thereafter. A trip back to Indiana and a conversation with her mother are enough to move our heroine up a step on the emotional maturity ladder; she returns to Leon, ready now for what he offers her. To her credit, Swain wears her knowingness like a loose garment: set in Williamsburg, New York City’s latest hipster hotbed, with a shaven-headed, goateed, rock-’n’-roll drummer love object and up-to-the-minute secondary characters like his bandmates in Mr. Whipple, the wealth of trendy how-they-live-now detail remains supporting texture rather than shiny distractions to the reasonably entertaining action.
Romance fiction right on target for rocker girls with a little therapy under their belts.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-6487-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Weisberger writes with humor and authority, but her plot circles like a whirlpool—and by the time Andrea’s ready to face...
A junior assistantship to the editor of the world’s top fashion magazine (“The job a million girls would die for”) provides endless fodder for a one-note but on-the-money kiss-and-tell debut.
Andy, or, as her boss from hell calls her: “Ahn-dre-ah,” harbors dreams of writing for The New Yorker, but her luck runs out—or runs high, depending on your priorities—when her first job interview lands her at Runway magazine, beholden to Miranda Priestly, “solely responsible for anticipating her needs and accommodating them.” Intelligent, sarcastic and without a smidgen of interest in fashion, Andrea quickly learns the Runway culture, from the necessity of being tall, emaciated, slavish, and half-naked in winter to the perks of town cars, shopping bags filled with designer duds, and the promise of any job after one year of servitude. A few weeks of dealing with the insensitive, sadistic and imperious Miranda leave our heroine on the verge of abdicating, but before long she’s joining her colleagues in “the classic Runway Paranoid Turnaround . . . scrambling to negate whatever blasphemy is uttered” about the divine Miranda.” Outside of work, Andrea has a perfectly nice socially conscious boyfriend from her college days at Brown, a best-friend-slash-roommate with a drinking problem who’s getting her doctorate at Columbia, a loving family in Connecticut, and no time for any of them as she races to retrieve Miranda’s French bulldog puppy from the vet, hire a nanny for her children, make 12 trips in stiletto heels to Starbucks for her coffee in between sorting her dirty dry cleaning. It’s only a 14-hour day! Ultimately, of course, everything explodes, and in the end, of course, righteousness prevails.
Weisberger writes with humor and authority, but her plot circles like a whirlpool—and by the time Andrea’s ready to face some hard choices, it’s difficult to care. Her exhaustion is contagious. (N.B: Weisberger, this season’s buzz of the town, was an assistant to Vogue editrix Anna Wintour—read: Miranda Priestly—giving this putative roman-à-clef an added splash of juice.)Pub Date: April 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50926-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends,...
Before sobriety, Catherine "Cat" Coombs had it all: fun friends, an exciting job, and a love affair with alcohol. Until she blacked out one more time and woke up in a stranger’s bed.
By that time, “having it all” had already devolved into hiding the extent of her drinking from everyone she cared about, including herself. Luckily for Cat, the stranger turned out to be Jason Halliwell, a rather delicious television director marking three years, eight months, and 69 days of sobriety. Inspired by Jason—or rather, inspired by the prospect of a romantic relationship with this handsome hunk—Cat joins him at AA meetings and embarks on her own journey toward clarity. But sobriety won’t work until Cat commits to it for herself. Their relationship is tumultuous, as Cat falls off the wagon time and again. Along the way, Cat discovers that the cold man she grew up endlessly failing to please was not her real father, and with his death, her mother’s secret escapes. So she heads for Nantucket, where she meets her drunken dad and two half sisters—one boisterously welcoming and the other sulkily suspicious—and where she commits an unforgivable blunder. Years later, despairing of her persistent relapses, Jason has left Cat, taking their daughter with him. Finally, painfully, Cat gets clean. Green (Saving Grace, 2014, etc.) handles grim issues with a sure hand, balancing light romance with tense family drama. She unflinchingly documents Cat’s humiliations under the influence and then traces her commitment to sobriety. Simultaneously masking the motivations of those surrounding our heroine, Green sets up a surprising karmic lesson.
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends, like addiction, may endanger her future.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04734-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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