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Wednesday, 10:37 pm in Books & Comics

So last night I finished Bitter is the New Black.  Just as I suspected, there is no great catharsis.  In fact, the more I read the less I liked Jen or felt empathy with her story, which I’ve gathered from the reviews I've read is not actually what I’m supposed to be feeling at all.  Perhaps it’s my unfamiliarity with the genre of chick lit.  Perhaps it’s the fact that I’d take a self-indulgent yuppie over self-martyring white trash anyday.  Perhaps its the fact that I’m the daughter of an immigrant* with a political science degree who works as a bureaucrat so when I come across a hysterical, conservative, corporate, affluent white American girl all I feel is a vague sense of disgusted pity.  At least at the start of the book when she was rich and narcissistic she was funny in a train wreck kind of way.  But I don’t like fallen-from-grace rich kids at all.

I suppose this is the difference between novels and real life, and perhaps also why real life doesn’t make for very good novels.  There was no real narrative continuation.  Sure, Jen learns the wisdom of frugality; good for her, welcome to the grown-up world.  She does not, however, seem to learn very much at all about anything else.  Honestly?  I was glad Courtney stabbed her in the back; because you are never doing it “for their own good” and I would physically harm anyone who tried to tell me as much.  I failed to see what was wrong with the immigrant ghetto she moved into.  I tactfully kept reminding her in my head that the American Founding Fathers deliberatley gave their country no official language so that it would be welcoming to all.  As for the ‘modest’ wedding in Vegas?  Excuse me?  I burst out laughing on that one, seriously.  You know where my parents got married?  Their backyard.  That’s modest.

At the end of the day, if you absolutley must read this book I’d recommend that you do so in a place where you will only have time to get through roughly the first half of it (such as a cross-country flight, but not international).  It’s not like you don’t already know how it ends, anyway; she gets a book deal.

Onto next month’s…

It’s time to click again.  I remember back when I started at BE (all those many weeks ago), one of the sites that reached out and slapped me in the face was Long, Slow, Beautiful Dance.  I figured that was as good a reason as any to choose Laci to be this week’s renter, so here she is.

So clickit; you know you want to.

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* Dad.  Mum’s family too, technically, but they’ve been here since the First Fleet, so it doesn’t count so much.

• Tags » blogsphere, book review, renters
• Comments By » Michele
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