For my trip to Belize, I decided to bring only mindless chick-lit, so that no intellectual processing would interfere with my pool-side laziness. I am also trying to get through all these books Raz lent me so long ago. I had semi-high hopes for Citizen Girl. It is written by the same duo that gave us The Nanny Diaries - a book that I think all the real mothers I know hate with a vengeance, but I found pretty entertaining. Citizen Girl features a character known simply as "Girl." In many ways, this is distressing, because if she is supposed to represent the Everygirl, then I think we are in serious trouble. Girl has been taught well by her feminist mother and is ready to change the world. She lands the seemingly perfect job (after being fired from her non-profit by a back-stabbing boss) - without a proper interview, and without any real understanding of what she is supposed to be doing. It has something to with launching a campaign to attract young feminists to an amorphous website run entirely by men, which in the ultimate satirical twist, turns into distressing pornography. Girl also has a random love interest - apparently, the reader is supposed to believe that the two have some sort of strong connection, but all their conversations are highly irritating and they do not seem to understand each other on any level - not to mention the fact that the love interest's friends are complete jerks. As Girl plugs along in her job, she finds herself questioning her integrity and her ability to continue to work on a project for which she has no support and no guidance. But, instead of being an insightful novel about the difficulties of the independent working woman to reconcile her ideals with reality, Girl is simply a whiny character who stands for nothing and is merely a mish-mash of ideas she has been fed by others. While a number of the frustrating scenes present Girl in typical real-life corporate work situations, there is nothing about the way she deals with the challenges that says anything positive about feminism or the power of women to succeed in a man's world. This book is poorly written and the characters are barely one-dimensional. A definite sophomore slump for the writers who have been called a One-Hit Wonder.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Citizen Girl: Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
For my trip to Belize, I decided to bring only mindless chick-lit, so that no intellectual processing would interfere with my pool-side laziness. I am also trying to get through all these books Raz lent me so long ago. I had semi-high hopes for Citizen Girl. It is written by the same duo that gave us The Nanny Diaries - a book that I think all the real mothers I know hate with a vengeance, but I found pretty entertaining. Citizen Girl features a character known simply as "Girl." In many ways, this is distressing, because if she is supposed to represent the Everygirl, then I think we are in serious trouble. Girl has been taught well by her feminist mother and is ready to change the world. She lands the seemingly perfect job (after being fired from her non-profit by a back-stabbing boss) - without a proper interview, and without any real understanding of what she is supposed to be doing. It has something to with launching a campaign to attract young feminists to an amorphous website run entirely by men, which in the ultimate satirical twist, turns into distressing pornography. Girl also has a random love interest - apparently, the reader is supposed to believe that the two have some sort of strong connection, but all their conversations are highly irritating and they do not seem to understand each other on any level - not to mention the fact that the love interest's friends are complete jerks. As Girl plugs along in her job, she finds herself questioning her integrity and her ability to continue to work on a project for which she has no support and no guidance. But, instead of being an insightful novel about the difficulties of the independent working woman to reconcile her ideals with reality, Girl is simply a whiny character who stands for nothing and is merely a mish-mash of ideas she has been fed by others. While a number of the frustrating scenes present Girl in typical real-life corporate work situations, there is nothing about the way she deals with the challenges that says anything positive about feminism or the power of women to succeed in a man's world. This book is poorly written and the characters are barely one-dimensional. A definite sophomore slump for the writers who have been called a One-Hit Wonder.
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