5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Delicious, Fun and Ultimately Touching Read, September 9, 2008
This is a great book to curl up with and devour. It's so nice to start a novel and know within the first few pages you're going to love the read. It never let me down. Aside from being well-written and just plain fun, GUILDING LILY offers a delicious glimpse into New York high society. Yet, even though most of us don't live lives anything like Lily's, we can still identify with her struggles for acceptance from others and ultimately herself.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Makes Plum Sykes look like John Updike, September 9, 2009
Thank goodness I got this as gift, because even $5 is a ripoff for this piece of retrograde trash. I wanted to throw in the towel at page 17, but I kept going because I relished the thought of writing this review.
This book sucks. DO NOT BUY. Here's why:
1) Why is Lily such a wimp? Everything her worthless baby daddy does is OK, apparently, because she's in wuv, twue wuv, with him. But why? There is no convincing back narrative for her love for Robert, just a lot of twaddle about her physical attraction and "she felt she could trust him" when she first met him. WTF? There is nothing in the book to contradict the reader's conclusion that Robert is a selfish, lazy rich boy and that Robert and Lily got married too quickly. He has no ambition, which Lily states on more than one occasion that her partner should have. Way to stick to your principles, lady. And everything the mother in law perpetrates, Lily just shuts up and takes because she secretly likes the trappings of the Park Avenue Princess life. And Lily's own mother is breathtakingly sexist, which only perturbs Lily slightly. And it's never explained why Lily liked her life as a journalist, and the conflict between staying home and continuing to work is never examined with the rigor that a real working mother would bring to it. Basically, Lily is an unlikeable cipher, spineless and venal, without an original thought of her own. Which leads to #2...
2) The poor proofreader at the publishing house should be fired, unfortunately. Boncompagni uses "venal" in one instance where she means "evil" or similar, and uses "discrete" where she should use "discreet." And those are just two instances I can think of without trying real hard. Grammar and usage. Please pay attention to it.
3) Boncompagni is not a good enough writer to convey the profundity of being responsible for a small human being. Instead, the repeated descriptions of how awesome breastfeeding is just come off as grotesque fetishization of mommyhood. I guess this fetishization substitutes for a real examination of the conflict between wanting to work (which Lily doesn't want, anyway) and wanting to raise children. Ugh, so cheesy, because Bomcompagni doesn't have the words to make motherhood sing. The use of typical adjectives when describing the baby and Lily's love for him and using phrases like "he [the baby] was her world now" just will make you puke. I can name five mommybloggers who are more lyrical on a daily basis.
4) Besides Lily, almost every other character in the book is unlikeable. Except possibly for Allison. Why should anyone care what happens to a bunch of starving, mean, predatory twits on the Upper East Side? Anna Wintour has been pimping these kinds of people for years in Vogue, and I still don't care what moisturizer they use or how much they liked Alber Elbaz's last collection. This whole book presupposes that one cares about the UES subspecies already. Actual classic American literature set in the Gilded Age never supposed the reader would be immediately sympathetic to its subjects.
Look, if you want to read a story of a woman ruining her "prospects," just go straight to the source and read House of Mirth or Sister Carrie.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gilding Lily, September 9, 2008
I thoroughly enjoyed Gilding Lily. Tatiana Boncompagni really knows the world about which she writes. She captures the foibles of young Manhattan socialites brilliantly. This book was absolutely impossible for me to put down. I read it in two sittings. The characters felt very real and the story moves at a brisk clip. If you enjoy intelligent books about the world of Manhattan high society, this one is for you.
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