Much like the satirical novel of which she is the heroine, Clarissa Alpert is initially annoying but grows on you. The ultimate dumb bunny, she hops around Beverly Hills going shopping, getting manicures, lunching with her equally vapid friends and chasing after rich potential husbands.
But there's hope for Clarissa, the 31-year-old (she admits only to 28) leading lady of Grazer's amusing second novel. After finding herself penniless, pregnant and estranged from the film producer she wed, she finds that life extends past Rodeo Drive. (Grazer is herself hitched to Hollywood mogul Brian Grazer, who won an Oscar producing A Beautiful Mind.) First, though, Clarissa endures her own version of the five stages of grief: "Denial and Isolation, Anger, Shopping, Bikini Wax, and Acceptance."
If Grazer, whose prose style could charitably be called breezy, is not an especially artful writer, she's a funny one. It takes a sharp mind to precisely, and even sympathetically, capture a woman who considers food poisoning a welcome diet aid.
BOTTOM LINE: A relatively tasty treat
Jennifer Vanderbes
Critic's Choice
In 1912, 22-year-old Elsa boards a ship to Easter Island as part of her husband's anthropological expedition. For two years they will live on the remote, unsettled island, cut off from the world. In 1973 a botanist named Greer Farraday flies to the same island to study pollen.
The chapters alternate among the tales of Elsa, Greer and Graf von Spee, a German vice admiral whose WWI fleet briefly anchored at, you guessed it, Easter Island. Botany, anthropology, history? Add in a few lengthy talks on Darwinism and magnolia pollen, and you've got a book full of the kinds of passages most readers are tempted to skip. Don't. Vanderbes has a sure eye for detail and a sophisticated plan. Like not-quite-parallel lines, Elsa and Greer and von Spee's stories move closer together until the end, when they artfully meet. As that moment comes, you'll be glad you savored every word in this rich and worldly first novel.
BOTTOM LINE: Glorious Easter
by Jon Katz
George Bernard Shaw once said that a dog's life is a ride aboard a pleasure steamer. Not so, says Katz in these profiles of people who have unusually tight relationships with their canines. The stories—all drawn from Katz's Montclair , N.J., hometown-are alternately heartwarming and chilling. There is Harry, a corgi with Dumbo-size ears who became a cancer-stricken woman's best medicine. Chester, a black Lab, was voted "Man of the Year" by members of a divorced women's group. And pit bull Dre was beaten by his young owner every day to make him a fierce guard dog. In one of the most intriguing sections of this well-written report, journalist Katz meets a pet rescuer who can't seem to bond with her kids but tirelessly helps abandoned animals. He does a terrific job of examining how dogs are handling their "new work": serving as many a family's nurturer in chief.
BOTTOM LINE: Deserves a blue ribbon
by George Jacobs
John F. Kennedy did coke? Dean Martin didn't party? Peter Lawford stiffed prostitutes? These revelations spice up Jacobs's otherwise bland look at his time as Frank Sinatra's valet. From 1953 until 1968 (when he got fired for dancing with Mia Farrow, then Mrs. Frank Sinatra), Jacobs saw the debauchery that became Rat Pack legend. There isn't enough dish, but what there is arrives on White House china: Sinatra wanted JFK elected President because, Jacobs says, "[Joe] Kennedy was a drug dealer of the high known as success and Frank Sinatra was a hardcore addict." As for other controlled substances, Jacobs says he watched Kennedy take cocaine at Sinatra's Palm Springs house. "Jack must have seen the shocked look on my face," Jacobs writes. "'For my back, George,' Kennedy said with his bad-boy wink."
BOTTOM LINE: Recycled Rat Pack crumbs
by John Sandford
In Sandford's latest novel featuring Lucas Davenport, the criminals are as cold and hard as the ground in a Minnesota winter. The former twin cities homicide cop now works as a special investigator for the governor. When a black man and a white woman are found lynched near the Canadian border, Lucas and his partner Del head north to prairie country. But the race angle doesn't pan out, and the case veers into other, unexpected felonies. One delicious surprise in Sandford's well-paced mystery is that there are three major crimes going on, and tiny town gossips haven't caught up with any of them. Even after Lucas thinks he has nabbed all the players, he hasn't: The niftiest twist comes on the last page.
BOTTOM LINE: Big thrills in a small town
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Allison Lynn,
- Cathy Burke,
- Gersh Kuntzman,
- Edward Karam.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
