Customer Reviews

Chloe Does Yale

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(28)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

And this is no substitute. It's kind of an insult to SATC actually, because it steals from it so shamelessly. The best friends are all the same, the columnist's last name is Carrington, etc. I mean, really shameless. It's "chick lit" I guess, but isn't chick lit supposed to be funny or something? And clever? And interesting. Chloe Does Yale doesn't quite fit those categories! There are a lot of reasons why, but mostly because, well, how to put this...Natalie Krinsky couldn't write a classified ad, much less a whole novel. Spoiled rich girls may be indulged by their parents, but businesspeople like publishers and editors might want to be a little more careful! Wait until a girl has some experience before you print her veiled memoir.

My goodness!!!

This is the worst book I've ever picked up. It is very poorly written, full of phrases that try very hard to be cute but that just sound ridiculous. Example: "Self depreciating humor is my specialty. Thank you, New York! And good night!" I suppose I'm a bit silly to expect Candace Bushnell in a book about a college sex column, but this book is especially bad. Oh, and the vibrator in the suitcase anecdote? She tells it as though no one has ever heard it before, that it's not recycled from Fight Club and about a hundred other books and movies. Is there a fresh idea in this book at all? The sex column premise and the book title are both recycled, too. The author needs to get a clue when it come to writing dialogue. "She ponders," "She says gently," "she responds..." Really, "She says" is fine.

I can only wonder if the author's sex columns at Yale were as self-gratifying as the columns in this book. All she does is talk about herself, rather than discussing issues that might be of relavance to a sex column. That's slightly acceptable, though, because many columnists do that and I suppose the author might not have known any better.

As much as I would like to support a young female author, I have nothing good to say about this book. Better luck next time.

I will repeat what others have said before: There is no plot. There is not nearly as much sex as a book with the title Chloe Does Yale should have. But there were other things that bothered me...

Like the style, for example. Krinsky simply cannot write. I'm not a master of fiction myself, but that's why I haven't had a book published. Her novel is riddled with adverbs, like "jokingly," "sternly," "quietly," etc. And like Stephen King said regarding adverb usage--if the reader can't tell that a character is joking or being stern or speaking quietly without you blatantly telling them, you're doing something wrong--you're telling rather than showing. Either that or you're implying that the reader can't detect sarcasm or seriousness or whatever you're trying to convey. It feels like she's probably looking down on the reader in some way, assuming that only stupid people will read her lame novel that leaves NOTHING for the reader to interpret or contemplate. Now, I did not expect something intellectually stimulating when I purchased this book. But I sure didn't expect something written for a high school freshmen, either. I expected to laugh, I expected to encounter a fresh look at the dating scene on a typical college campus. If you expect those things too, look elsewhere.

I actually heard about Chloe Does Yale when I read a mostly negative review of it in People magazine. I thought they were just being kinda cool, though, dissing on the book, and any book called Chloe Does Yale would be a fun thing to read, so I picked it up. However, I read it last night, skimming some parts I confess but only because I was getting bored, and I now see I should have paid attention to the review. Chloe is not an interesting character, she's too self-involved, and the stories aren't convincing and strong like in really good novels (and like other reviewers noted, yeah, CDY is basically a ripoff of Sex & the City). Lots of stereotypes are used, like the gay guy named Crystal who's always mincing around and giving catty advice, and the Asian girl who is intellectual but also promiscuous. The thing about Chloe is not only does she not really care about anyone, she has no respect for herself, and it's not fun to read. (Having no plot is a problem, too.) There were a few funny parts in the book, and its not as AWFUL as some reviewers seem to think, but I'm going to return it to the bookstore on my way to work tomorrow and pick up something better.

Oh, look! Natalie Krinsky's old Yale classmate, Hilary Hammell (google her, you'll see) has posted a positive review of Krinsky's pathetic novel. What a surprise!

And pathetic it is. Not only can Krinsky not use adverbs (also, nouns and verbs) properly, she can't tell a story, write interesting characters, or tell us anything interesting or noteworthy about the world. Some of the analogies used in the book are just incredibly terrible and stupid, and the book as a whole is totally boring. (As a side note, how can you write a book whose title is based on a porn film and whose cover features the silhouette of the main character naked--and have no sex in the book!?)

Oh god why, why have you plagued mankind with this rubbish? Is this the crap our "best and brightest" spew out? I should have stopped afer the first couple chapters, but like a train wreck, I had to keep reading. I derived about 3 chuckles from this book, and about 500 groans, 250 sighs of exasperation, and 100 self inflicted slaps for wasting my money on this.

It's just not good folks. Just go rent some Sex and the City DVDs.

Hahahaha--the last reviewer is exactly right. I read this book a while ago but didn't bother to review it because there were something like 50 reviews on this page, and almost all of them were one or two stars. But now I see that Krinsky and her publishers, having failed in their first attempt to make this wretched book a "summer beach read bestseller" or whatever, got all the bad reviews wiped off the page! Pathetic!

So, about the book...after all, that's what I'm reviewing here. It's terrible. That a Yale student could produce tripe like this is one of the funniest ironies I've encountered in a while--it makes me wonder whether she really is as talentless as the book's quality seems to indicate, or whether she just didn't care about quality at all, trusting that the electric pink cover would sell tons of copies on its own.

The worst thing about the book is how cliched every sentence is. She mixes up her metaphors so carelessly it's astonishing. The weak adverbs cluttering up every page are the sure mark of an insecure, amateur writer. What's the point of rambling on...this is a boring book, 'nuff said. Still, you know what? I probably would have forgiven a lot of those technical errors and stumbles if there had actually been some, you know, sex in this book. To tip my hat to the title of a much-better novel (by Zoe Heller): What was she thinking???