Customer Reviews

Spygirl: True Adventures from My Life as a Private Eye

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

A good read. The author's subtle sense of humor made the book. Her recounting of her personal life was actually much more interesting than the PI stuff. It was full of cool chix doing their thing in NYC with attitude. I liked that Cassie character.

Amy Gray is like a younger, female Woody Allen. She really gets it. She's captured that peculiar sorrow of living lonely in New York, with raw laugh-out-loud-funny dialog (much of it of the four letter kind) that had tears running down my face. (I live in a different big city on a western coast but grew up in NYC) I must admit the book flagged bit in the middle as the cases got a bit slow, but Gray's crackling dialogue and lovable/slighty demented characters serve well and deliver a very sweet moment in the end, for the characters and the reader.

This is truly a delightful novel. It is original and helps fill a gap in literature for young women's truthful voices. Gray really gets inside the psyche of the curious, independent woman in New York on a quest for answers; whether in her personal or her professional life. Gray's hilarious account of her years as a P.I. and the ridiculously colorful characters kept me glued to my couch turning pages the whole way through.
The narrative structure of this novel was fascinating and held together the various threads of the story that focuses mostly on Gray's current social life and current work projects. The images her prose evokes are crisp, vivid and bright. Amy also illustrates a pack of questionable men she keeps running into en route to finding a compatible boyfriend with light-hearted humor even as she reveals her disappointment in making yet another mistake in becoming involved. Her stories are funny, frightening and all too familiar to women of her generation. Gray deftly weaves snippets of her past that led to her present and does quick yet evocative sketches of many influences in her life. This novel is a lot of fun, superbly written and not to be missed.

Amy Gray is a great writer, but she excels at comedy. There are so many clever scenes--an arm wrestling scene at the PI office (amid rat traps and wiffle bats) another at an amateur strip party in New York, or at the annual office Halloween party where her co-workers have some unfortunate costumes... The section headings alone are worth the price of admission: Kicking Ass and Taking Names, Requiem for a Smoker, Choking the Chicken, Who's your Daddy? This girl can write funny, which is rare to find. Highly recommended if you have a sense of humor and a curiousity about the world of detectives--especially what they do after hours.

But it might not do this book justice. This book is an unusual combination of twenty-something coming-of-age and sophisticated variations of the theme of spying. The author ruminates elegantly about the nature of memory, the construction of self, the difference between what is false and what is true, and she draws on sources from literature and popular culture to illustrate her points-from Woody Allen to the X-Files, Nabokov and Dostoyevsky. It's a difficult balance to strike, not doubt, but I have to applaud her ambition. I think this book is way more complex than the descriptions may imply, but for the most part, it succeeds. It may put off people just looking for mind candy, which it's not, although it's still a good yarn.

This book really has magical moments! There is lots to like - with wonderful humor, deftly drawn characters, the adventure of tracking the "bad guys," and most especially, the honesty and angst of the 20-something generation. The writing was amazing - I was sad to see it end (perhaps a sequel is in the works?). I agree with another reviewer who said that SPYGIRL has surprising depth. Gray is young, but the reader can see her learning and growing as the story plays out. Highly recommended!

This book really won me over--the more I read the better it got. It seemed to gain authority and develop a surer, funnier, wiser voice as the chapters progressed; as I neared the end, I was saddened and in a weird state of disbelief that I had to stop reading. Gray's pacing is brisk, her details confident and exact, her love of life evident and cheering. How many books have invoked the Dr. Zizmor subway ad as a really successful metaphor? Just one, I daresay.

This book is damn funny; I read it at a friend’s house a while ago and meant to post a review, and never did. Then I just read in Variety that they'’re doing a TV show of it. I'’ll be the first person to tune in, if it’s anything like the book!

This book is hilarious! I laughed out loud every few pages. But in addition to being funny and well-written, Spy Girl is also insightful and reflective. And if you're a New Yorker you'll enjoy the many references to different places in the city. It's a very fun read and I highly recommend it.

This is not a mystery, thriller or any other kind of genre. It's a coming-of-age story that happens to be about a PI, and my friends and I related to it completely. Even my boyfriend-who normally only reads historical non-fiction--stole it from me to read in bed and was constantly chuckling to himself and reading it aloud to me. Very surprising. The book encompasses a year in the life of a private investigator, and weaves material from her cases with her life-friends, loves, etc. It is funny, honest, hard when it needs to be, and delicate when appropriate. I would have liked more color on the cases, though. Otherwise, I was smitten. Please, please do a novel next! I'm on the waiting list...