August TBR challenge — Secret Society Girl by Diana Peterfreund

Elite Eli University junior Amy Haskel never expected to be tapped into Rose & Grave, the country’s most powerful – and notorious – secret society. She isn’t rich, politically connected, or . . . well, male. So when Amy receives the distinctive black-line invitation with the Rose & Grave seal, she’s blown away. Could they really mean her?

Whisked off into an initiation rite that’s a blend of Harry Potter and Alfred Hitchcock, Amy awakens the next day to a new reality and a whole new set of “friends” – from the gorgeous son of a conservative governor to an Afrocentric lesbian activist whose society name is Thorndike. And that’s when Amy starts to discover the truth about getting what you wish for. Because Rose & Grave is quickly taking her away from her familiar world of classes and keggers, fueling a feud, and undermining a very promising friendship with benefits. And that’s before Amy finds out that her first duty as a member of Rose & Grave is to take on a conspiracy of money and power that could, quite possibly, ruin her whole life. (Bookflap summary © Diana Peterfreund, Delacorte Press)

LibraryThing

LibraryThing is my new favorite website. I found it originally via Rosina Lippi’s blog. I added a whole bunch of books from my library — with many more to go. I really like the widget that posts random bookcovers from your library . . . except the javascript doesn’t work in Live Journal. So I’ve posted it to my blog over at blogspot . . . which gets very little traffic (intentionally so). According to a note at LibraryThing, they are working on a widget that will be compatible with LJ.

Short book report:

To the Tower Born by Robin Maxwell. Tale of what really happened to the two princes in the Tower, with an alternate bad guy in lieu of Richard III. Narrated alternately by Queen Bessie, sister of the two princes and wife of Henry VII (Tudor), and Nell Caxton, daughter of William Caxton, printer/publisher of books translated into English. Liked it lots, thanks to Jay who posted about it a while back. B

The Younger Man by Sarah Tucker. Published by RDI, the title and back blurb make this sound like chick lit. But it’s not, it is very much Women’s Fiction; the romance is a very small piece of the story; the reader spends a great deal more time with the heroine’s friends, daughter, esthetician (sp?), and memories of her defunct marriage. Got the feeling that the heroine didn’t really like men; she seemed to have no respect for them. I know, there is no black/white, just shades of grey, but the men in the novel were none of them particularly charming or likeable. C-.

Exes and Ohs by Beth Kendrick

Finished reading Beth Kendrick’s Exes and Ohs, which I enjoyed. It is a 2005 chick lit book that, if I had read in time, would probably have given If Andy Warhol Had A Girlfriend serious competition for my vote for Best Chick Lit in the AAR poll.

Exit the groom…

Child psychologist Gwen Traynor has learned the hard way that “perfect” men aren’t always what they seem. After being dumped the night before her wedding, she’s understandably wary of diving back into the dating pool. But when she meets Alex Coughlin, she’s convinced her luck is changing. He’s smart, handsome, funny — an ideal rebound guy. She doesn’t intend to fall in love with him, but scintillating dates and mind-blowing physical chemistry have a way of winning a girl over.

Enter the ex…

Just as things are heating up with Alex, Gwen meets her newest patient — a precocious preschooler whose chaotic soap opera-actress of a mother, Harmony, sounds an awful lot like one of Alex’s crazy ex-girlfriends. Mostly because she is one of Alex’s crazy ex-girlfriends. Unfortunately for Gwen, Harmony has a secret that plunges them all into a real-life daytime drama, complete with sex, lies, and Vegas elopements. With Harmony determined to reunite with Alex and Gwen’s ex-fiancé begging for a second chance, only one thing is certain:
New loves and old flames are an explosive combination.

Actually, the hook for me wasn’t even the back blurb, it was the tag line on the front: Mr. Perfect’s past is about to ruin her future.

Gwen first meets Alex Coughlin on a very bad day: she’s in rumpled track pants, running late for a meeting with her academic advisor, having just run into her ex-fiance, and she’s basically having a meltdown. In a fit of frustration, she tosses her uncharged cellphone into the street, where it is run over. Alex witnesses cellphone destruction and stops to talk to her. Turns out that he recognizes her from a trustee tour of the clinic in which she is doing research. After rescuing her from her meeting, they have a good first date. Because of the meltdown he witnessed, Gwen explains about the ex-fiance and the dumping; Alex tells her about his last serious relationship, with a soap opera actress that he was thinking about proposing to when he caught her cheating.

Alex is a financial analyst, a nice guy with a desire to have a Leave it to Beaver family: house in Colorado, SAHW, multiple children. While thinking his dreams are deluded and doomed to disaster, Gwen decides that he’ll be a good rebound guy. But after the first official date, it turns out that she can’t use him to erase her ex, because she likes Alex. Their relationship develops fairly rapidly, but it’s clear that they have a lot in common. Kendrick shows (not tells) this with the stuff they do together and with conversations about tv, humor and other things they have in common (or not).

Enter Harmony, mother of Leo, who turns out to be Alex’s ex. Leo is having some behavioral issues, so he’s getting therapy. In the course of taking the family history, etc., Gwen learns that Leo’s dad isn’t around – because Harmony never told Leo’s dad that she was pregnant and they broke up in an ugly way. Harmony is fairly flaky and belongs to a New Age Cult that among its other tenets, does take the family role seriously. So she decides that it is time to tell Leo’s father about him. You can see what’s coming, can’t you?

Alex does not take the news well at first. After getting over the shock, his immediate instinct is to Do The Right Thing, to attempt to make a family. Gwen, of course, has mixed emotions. As a child psychologist, she believes that a stable home and family is the best thing for Leo, but does it have to be with Alex? She turns Leo over to another psychologist and tries to take a step back from being involved in the Harmony-Leo-Alex family experiment.

Despite her attempt to step back from them, Harmony and Leo and Alex keep appearing in her life. Gwen can’t go forward and she can’t go back, and is back to feeling as bad or worse than when the ex-fiance dumped her.

I really liked that Kendrick’s characters seem real. They all have good qualities and bad, behave well sometimes and poorly other times. Leo is a normal 5 year old, neither angelic nor demonic. Gwen is a nice person, but she doesn’t let people walk all over her; her original goal with Alex and her treatment of another character, Paul, are not so admirable, but most of the time she has good intentions. Alex has valid reasons for his dreams of a perfect family, even if he is kind of selfish about Gwen’s role in all of this. [Stay friends? Sure, he gets hot wife and cool-gal-pal on the side, while she’s stuck mooning over a guy she can’t have. Great for him but not good for Gwen at all.] Harmony really does want to be a good mom and build a family for Leo, even if she is shallow, vain, and self-centered. I had a hard time disliking her, although I wanted to because of something she did near the end of the book.

The pacing was very well done and no part of the book dragged. The plot of the book is over a fairly short period of time, and the pacing and tone matched the fast passage of time in the book. It was a fairly quick read. I liked Kendrick’s style/voice, so I’ll probably pick up her other book the next time I see it at the bookstore. And I liked that her message wasn’t that you shouldn’t try to Do The Right Thing, but that the Right Thing may not be what you think it is and may not be the traditional RT.

My only knocks: the Vegas interlude was not needed and was a little distracting; I get that Kendrick was using it as a mechanism for Gwen to be living alone and be okay with herself, but why not just have the roommate move out or get married? Why have all of these unrelated people show up in Vegas? It reminded me of an episode of Friends. The epilogue, while nice, was also unnecessary. I felt like the books could have ended without it and I would not have missed it. Second knock: the point of view is first person, but Gwen’s sudden acceptance of her life/situation was very abrupt, with little or no lead in or development. She goes from being miserable to being okay with everything without any reflection on screen, so to speak.

The back blurb is a little misleading because the ex-fiance makes only two brief appearances, once at the beginning and once near the end. He does want to get Gwen back, but that is a very small part of the plot.

All in all, a pretty good book, so EAO gets an A- from me.

SB Day — Chick Lit

To begin, let me first acknowledge that I do read and enjoy books that are purported to be chick lit.

So why bitch about it? Well, my first gripe is the name “chick lit.” It seems vaguely derrogatory to me, in the same way that “chick flick” is. Guys use that to classify a group of films that they think are sort of beneath them, and I kinda feel like that’s the same thing tha publishers, reviewers and readers are doing to those of us who read these trade paper back sized books about young, urban women. Wouldn’t the phrases “dick lit” and “dick flick” be considered a little offensive? But not the feminine alternative? Why not? Is this another case of taking a slur (of sorts) and subverting it, refusing to accept offense? Or am I reading too much into it, and calling a someone a “chick” isn’t offensive to most women?

My next gripe: I think the writers and publishers of much of the recent chick lit are writing down to us as readers, dumbing us down. We (and they) are capable of putting better stuff in chick lit books, but they keep sticking to the tried and true, which has fans but also a lot of antifans. A lot of recent chick lit seems to be about shallow 20-30 somethings who live in the city (any city, but often NYC or London, depending on author/publisher), are clothing and shoe obsessed, and are underemployed, marking time in a deadend job with an abusive boss. [Devil Wears Prada, anyone?] Two books that I read recently that are chick lit with suspense were very good…but even those heroines were fashion-obsessed [The Givenchy Code and The Manolo Matrix]. When did owning a pair of $475 thongs become the symbol for coolness? There has got to be a better way of demonstrating youth, vitality, hipness, whatever you want to call it, without making clothing and shoes the main characteristic of a heroine. And why stick the supposedly smart heroines in a deadend job? Yes, we all pay dues with sucky jobs when we are young, but how many assistant editors at It magazine can there be? How many PR/ad goffers who aspire to the leadership position of the marketing group? How many people truly graduate with degrees in the liberal arts w/o recognizing that they need a plan for future employment that relies on more than their good looks or their parents’ bank account? Seriously. I don’t have to agree with everything that the heroine does or says, but I have to at least think she’s got a plan (or is trying to get one together) and is not being TSTL…and buying shoes instead of paying your rent or staying in a job where your ideas are stolen and you are harassed count as TSTL to me.

I’ve read that the mother of chick lit is Bridget Jones’ Diary. Or maybe Sex in the City. Haven’t read either of them, although I’ve caught SitC reruns on TBS. The first chick lit book I ever knowingly read was Rita Ciresi’s Pink Slip, which was set in NY in 1985. Ciresi managed to show the life and growth of a young urbanite, dealing with her family, her job, and a work romance, all without there being any significant amount of time spent on clothes or shoes. There were much bigger issues to address, like AIDS, death in her family, taking a step back from the brink of the mess she was about to become on several levels. If Ciresi could do that, why can’t other writers? [Note: While I loved PS, I would not recommend the follow up, published 5 or 6 years later, but set in 10+ years later, Tell Me Again Why I Married You. It’s WF, and not so uplifting WF at that.]

So, chick lit books that I’ve enjoyed:
Mean Season
If Andy Warhol Had A Girlfriend
Pushing 30
Imaginary Men
32AA
Speechless
Starting Over at Square Two
The Givenchy Code
The Manolo Matrix
…these last two despite their use of the fashionista as heroine.

Do you have any recommendations for me?

Imaginary Men by Anjali Banerjee

I read a review of Imaginary Men online; I can’t remember where, so I cannot send an email full of gratitude to the reviewer, but will post them here: Thank you, thank you, thank you! This is my first A of 2006.

Lina Ray has a knack for pairing up perfect couples as a professional matchmaker in San Francisco, but her well-meaning, highly traditional Indian family wants her to get married. When her Auntie Kiki introduces Lina to the bachelor from hell at her sister’s wedding in India, Lina panics and blurts out, “I’m engaged!” Because what’s the harm in a little lie?

Lina Ray is an woman caught between two cultures. At her sister’s wedding, she makes up a fiancé to put off her Auntie Kiki, who wants to introduce her to an eligible bachelor who reminds Lina of an Indian Pee Wee Herman. Shortly thereafter, she encounters an interesting man by the name of Raja Prasad. Their encounter is brief, but he sticks in her mind, so when her aunt bugs her for a name, Lina says, “Raja.” In order to make sure all is proper, Auntie Kiki goes to the astrologer with Lina’s birth information and that of the fake Raja. Disturbingly, the results are vague. Auntie Kiki then decides that she must come to the US to inspect the fiancé, and to be sure that he is right for Lina. Lina’s parents, while less pushy than Auntie Kiki, are equally relieved to hear that their oldest daughter is engaged once again. You see, Lina was once engaged to wonderful Nathu, who died in a car accident.

Back in the States, Lina begins a campaign to find a man to live up to the imaginary one that she told her family about. While acting as a professional matchmaker, she also tries to matchmake for herself, with little luck. At the same time, her imaginary man (not the fiancé, but the one who lives with her and used to resemble Nathu) has begun to resemble Raja. The real Raja appears in San Francisco for business and family reasons: he wants Lina to find a proper Indian wife for his younger brother, Dev.

When Raja appears on the scene, Lina is prepared not to like him, despite his good looks and charm: a prince, CEO of the family business, well-to-do, semi-engaged to a princess, picking out the wife for his younger brother with very high standards without his brother’s input or consent merely because the auspicious date for his brother’s wedding is approaching. But as they spend time together, it is clear that Raja is trying to do what he thinks is best for his family. He wants someone (not only for his brother but for himself as well) who will fit into his family and with whom he can share his life in India. I’m not sure I can explain exactly how it happened, but I went from not liking Raja very much to liking him a great deal. Banerjee did a very good job of showing, rather than telling, that Raja is a good person, despite the initial interview in Lina’s office.

Of course, eventually Lina’s imaginary fiancé becomes a problem: gossip reaches Raja, who is offended on a couple of levels. First that Lina did not tell him, and second on her behalf that her fiancé should travel and leave her so often. But worse is to come when she has to tell him the truth, that there is no fiancé at all.

While her personal life is going nowhere, Lina’s professional life is foundering as well. Normally a very successful matchmaker, none of her clients or their matches are working out.

Ultimately, Lina gathers the courage (with some encouragement from Raja) to tell her family the truth and explain how one little lie got away from her.

The title Imaginary Men refers to several things, I think: the fiancé Lina invented; the imaginary man who lives with her, looking first like Nathu and then later like Raja; the men she dates imagining that they can become the fiancé she invented; the man she imagined that Nathu had been; and the man Lina imagines Raja to be before she gets to know him.

At first glance, the plot of this book seems like a typical chick lit scenario with a heroine creating a boyfriend to save face, but it was more than that, I thought. In addition to trying to work her way out of a lie, Lina is trying to figure out where it is that she belongs in the world. Although she was born in India, she is thoroughly American in many ways. She drinks cha and eats samosas, but she doesn’t speak Bengali and barely cooks. Trips to India are expensive and typically vacation-like; she feels alien there sometimes and alien in the US sometimes.

Normally I would point to particular things that I liked about a book to back up the grade, but in this case, I liked everything. The characters are very well done (although Auntie Kiki was a little bit of a caricature), the book flows smoothly, etc. Ultimately, this book gets an A grade because Banerjee makes me care about what happens to Lina, makes me hope she can somehow reconcile the Indian and American pieces of herself, makes me hope that off-scene she eventually gets her HEA.