36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
No Sex and the City, February 21, 2005
This review is from: Chloe Does Yale (Hardcover)
With a title like "Chloe Does Yale", you might expect a racy, kicky Gen Y reboot of Sex and the City - you know, younger, leaner, faster, sexier. Instead, Natalie Krinsky serves up a lukewarm novel that steals -er, pays homage to - all the best bits of Sex and the City with none of the zing. Let's see if this sounds familiar- a first person account of a sex columnist in a East Coast city who doesn't have much luck at love. She has a friend who is wild and more experienced at sex, a gay man friend who consoles her in her travails, a conservative friend who loves her, but doesn't quite approve of all her shenanigans...argh, enough already. If you've seen five minutes of Sex and the City, you know where this is headed. She's even got the chutzpah to call her column "Sex and the (Elm) City". Yikes.
As far as narrative goes, it's really banal. A bunch of mundane dating and relationship stuff that has all the tension and surprise of a Golden Girls episode. If I didn't know better, I'd swear this was just a collection of old, previously published, half baked, sophomoric sex column advice strung together with a weak framing device. Oh wait, it is.
Several times throughout the book, the writer obsesses that her writing isn't that good, but her friends keep telling her - 'your column is hilarious', 'no, really! I couldn't stop laughing'. You know you are in trouble when the author has to write a scene where her characters tell her proxy that she can actually write. For a book that's supposed to be sexy, it's stunningly chaste. For a book that's supposed to be funny, it's amazingly sterile. I guess if you are a teenager and haven't really experienced any of the world or been to college, this might amuse you. For my money, it's about as enjoyable as watching Sex and the City on TBS - it goes through the motions, but never gets gritty enough to be any real fun. I really did want to like this book, but I was disappointed. I gave it two stars for the nifty cover, but you can look at that for free. Save your $.
Added on 3/5: Well, I thought it was just me and I might have been too harsh, but it seems like a lot of people had the same reaction to the book. Except, oddly enough, a slew of 4 and 5 star reviews all loving the book that came in on the same day (including two that use the same marketing department approved phrase "chick-lit for the smart girl"). You can believe those if you'd like, but I'd say that's either an amazing coincidence or the author's friends stuffing the ballot box. It's your time and money, spend it how you like.
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Boring and disappointing, for the most part, March 29, 2005
This review is from: Chloe Does Yale (Hardcover)
I thought that this book had a lot of promise, but overall, it did not entertain me.
I wasn't reading it for any kind of intellectual pleasure (as you can tell from the hot pink cover, or the blurb if you're color blind, it's just not that kind of book) but I was hoping for some well-written, clever entertainment. I wanted to read something fun, fluffy, and juicy. But Chloe Does Yale doesn't feel like any of those things, mostly because Natalie Krinsky is such an incredibly bad writer. As I got further and further along in the book, I started to feel a little weary, like I was running a marathon and there was garbage in the lane that I kept having to jump over. OK, kind of a messed-up metaphor, but I think you get the picture.
As for the complaints that it is a shameless ripoff of Sex and the City--well, what chick lit book isn't? At least, that's what I thought before I read it. I guess I didn't realize just how shameless Krinsky actually was in stealing from Candace Bushnell.
In summary, I guess, I just had an overall sense of disappointment with this book, although I will say that it does have one or two funny, original moments. I can't remember them clearly enough to cite an example, but at least they proved that the book wasn't written by a chick-lit-generating computer program or something.
Ciao!
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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not at all what it is advertised as, March 29, 2005
This review is from: Chloe Does Yale (Hardcover)
Is it sexy? No. Is it revealing? No. (You could find everything in it on the Yale website, and every single column reprinted in the book is available on the internet for free.) Is it funny? No. Honest? No. "Chick lit for the smart girl"? No. Is it "sparkling"? Um, not exactly. Is it a waste of money? Yes.
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