Daily Archives: 17 June 2004

Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas

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Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

James Patterson
Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you’re keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls – family, health, friends, integrity – are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. And once you truly understand the lesson of the five balls, you will have the beginnings of balance in your life.
–from Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas, by James Patterson
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Catching Alice

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Catching Alice

Clare Naylor

Sometimes chick-lit can be completely engaging and entertaining. A perfect example of this is Catching Alice, the story of a young woman who loses her boyfriend and her job, and is dragged to LA for a life-makeover.

While some of the situations stretch the envelope of plausability, the dialogue is good, and the depiction of the Hollywood publicity game is completely believable.

The Right Address

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The Right Address

Carrie Karasyov & Jill Kargman

I picked this up as an impulse buy because I’d seen a blurb about it in some magazine that compared it to The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada both of which I enjoyed for the guilty pleasure froth they are.

Alas, this book is nothing like either of those. Yes, it’s about a similar segment of society, but the characters in Prada and Nanny Diaries were at least reasonably three-dimensional, and there were some moments of normalcy.

The characters in this book are total cartoons, and there are no real moments of connection. It’s better, I suppose, than reading the back of the tampon box, but not by much.