THE IVY CHRONICLES

After losing job and husband, a high-powered businesswoman (unfortunately) finds herself: the latest in the Nanny Diaries cycle of employment novels.

Ivy Ames, in marketing for an investment house, is one of those frantically busy Wall Street women (mainlining coffee, handling the kids, hating her sexist boss) we’ve seen before. And, like most of them, she gets fired right off the bat and goes home to find hubby in flagrante with a family friend. Now unemployed, with a couple of rug-rats to feed and educate, Ivy has to figure out how to keep herself in private-school tuition and in bedding from ABC Home and Carpet. Having recently been of the ruling class, she figures out a service that parents of that class will need: consulting on how to get their children into private school. Never mind that nowhere does Quinn provide a good reason why the advice Ivy imparts to her clients couldn’t have been picked up at an Upper West Side soiree. All the reader can do is sit back and watch Ivy’s fabulous life come together in a ready-for-TV, label- and status-obsessed, technicolor fantasy. The first weakness is Ivy, barely qualifying as two-dimensional, so depressingly shallow that you might find yourself hoping for a Bonfire of the Vanities–style comeuppance at the end; she’s like a stranger wandering through her own story. And then there are the secondary characters, a clutch of stereotypes whose portrayals flirt with classism and racism at the best of times. And there’s Quinn’s writing, which provides Ivy with lines like, “To my surprise and joy, caring for the children was a joy,” in its attempt to humanize her (as a bonus, there’s a love scene that actually uses the words “loins” and “soft womanly flesh”).

Dull, obvious, offensive, Botox- and yoga-stuffed first novel.