Pot boiler

[airie43]

I've found a little love for the olde fashioned whodunit. I have a great desire to rewrite every short I have to re layer and make it into a whodunit to see where it fits.

This is what happens when I find myself googling butlers on wiki. I wind up in gosford park and back to Clue.

I also may have a screaming rant about one of my FORMER favorite

Comments

[airie43]

It's funny how the Amazon review system gives up to five stars, since Jen Lancaster's books started out with five and have now moved down to one. Truthfully, if I could have given negative stars, this would be the book that got them.

The author was at her best years ago, when she was broke and desperate and laugh out loud funny as she received her comeuppance and came through her unemployment a better person. She may not have been likeable at the beginning but at the end she was an every woman hero. Her second and third books tempered her growing arrogance with self deprecation that still entertained her readership. I loved the girl who threatened people with a shovel. I loved the girl with a fear of the scale. That girl is nowhere in this book. This book feels like it was written by the same lady who wrote the first pages of her first book. Lancaster has gone back to being unlikeable, unsympathetic and totally unfunny.

The book is little more than an expansion on her epilogue from Pretty in Plaid (a crapper in and of itself) which leads me to believe that the second Lancaster hit the NYT Bestseller list she stopped trying. That final chapter is a rant about how hard she worked and how successful she is and a step by step detail of how she basks in that success. No really. This book? The same drivel. She talks, again, about spending money most people don't have, doing things the former Jen couldn't do because she was flat broke and creative. I'm not entertained by a story where the heroin spends half my rent price on tea. I'm not amused by her segue on page 267 where she basically whines that she gets negative feedback because her readership is noticing that she has changed from wacky heroine to self-important snob. The majority of this book is available on her blog where she also whines about people who question her authenticity. However, on her blog, you can read, first hand, Jen's pleads to a personal army for a defense against those people who are being OMGSOMEAN. She also points out that she isn't speaking to her family and I can't help but wonder if it's because they don't condone her behavior. Finally, in case you forget, Jen spends a lot of time in her book reminding you that she and her husband are Republicans.

She claims that she never stated she'd stay broke forever, and she's right. It's unfortunate, though, because poor Jen was way more talented than Rich Jen. To put it bluntly, successful Jen successfully sucks.