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Mercury in Retrograde
When Mercury is in retrograde, the only guarantee is anything that can go wrong, will. Penelope Mercury, an intrepid reporter at the New York Telegraph , has pounded the pavement for five years from city borough to borough, carrying out her boss's eccentric orders to break stories that seem inconsequential to everyone but him. Finally, she is inches away from being promoted to her dream job -- covering courtroom drama for the paper -- but after one spectacularly disastrous day, she is fired instead. Lena "Lipstick Carcrash" Lipp encrass has a pretty fabulous life, even by a socialite's standards, as a top editor at the high fashion magazine Y . Long lunches with her girlfriends and afternoons spent shopping at Bergdorf's are all in a day's work. But when Lena's always indulgent parents abruptly cut off her cash flow and kick her out of her beloved West Village duplex for refusing to work for the family business, she is forced to confront the reality of what it takes to pay the bills. Dana Gluck, a workaholic lawyer, had been married for two years to a man who was perfect on paper but increasingly critical in reality. She hoped that her dreams of motherhood would be fulfilled soon, which surely would also fix their marriage problems. Instead, her husband leaves her for an exchange student/model who, to make matters worse, promptly gets pregnant. When fate conspires to have these three very different women move into the same SoHo apartment building, they soon discover that having their carefully planned lives fall to pieces might be the best thing that could have ever happened to them.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published May 15, 2009
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1,063 people want to read
About the author
Paula Froelich
5 books66 followersPaula Froelich is the New York Times best-selling author of the debut novel, “Mercury In Retrograde.” She is best known in New York for being the deputy editor of the New York Post’s gossip column, Page Six, where she worked for ten years until June, 2009. She was also a correspondent for “Entertainment Tonight” and “The Insider” from 2002 to 2006 and has appeared as a guest on “The View,” “Real Time With Bill Maher,” “Today,” “Good Morning America,” “The Early Show,” “Entertainment Tonight,” Extra,” “The Joy Behar Show,” “Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell” and “The Howard Stern Show.” Before The New York Post, Paula was a financial reporter, covering interest rate swaps and over the counter derivatives for Dow Jones Newswires and Institutional Investor. She currently freelances for Playboy, the New York Observer, and Modern Luxury Magazine.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 220 reviews
January 14, 2012
When does 2 + 2 + 4 + 2 + 3 + 2 = 1 star? For me it happened in the process of writing my review for Mercury in Retrograde by Paula Froelich. First, a few disclaimers: In general, I am not a reader of chick-lit, I have never seen an episode of Sex in the City, and I have never spent time in New York. However, since my day job (I’m a junior high school teacher) is pretty demanding, I sometimes want to unwind after an evening of grading papers and writing lesson plans by reading something relatively mindless. I have a wonderful group of female friends, I do have a healthy sense of humor, and frankly I love poking fun at people who think they are better than everyone else. So when I found Mercury in Retrograde on a remainders table at a nearby bookstore, I decided to buy it because the cover blurbs promised something along those lines. Big mistake.
When I grade my students’ writing, I use the six-trait model. Six aspects (or “traits”) of the writing are analyzed and rated on a scale of one to five (five being the best). The equation at the beginning of this review refers to the ratings I would give various traits of this book if I were to grade it the same way as I grade my students’ writing. Following are the rationales for each rating:
Ideas and Content-2. Given the genre of this book, Froelich did an adequate job of inventing diverse main characters—a journalist, a lawyer, and a socialite-cum-fashion designer—but then did little to make me like them or even remain interested in them. They seem to like each other mostly because intermediaries among them (the de rigueur gay guy friend and the equally obligatory-character-in-a-chick-lit-book-or-movie yoga instructor) say they should like each other. There is no moment of profundity, hilarity, or anxiety that allows us to see why they bond with each other. Most of the secondary characters are stereotypical (Marge, David, Neal, Trace, Bitsy, Jack, and Penelope’s characterization-by-telephone parents, to name a few). The romantic interests of the three main characters were underdeveloped. Froelich seemed incapable of writing a fun, romantic scene, preferring instead either to close the bedroom door on the characters or to have them exchange life stories. If there is anything worse than a writer who tells rather than shows, it is the character an author creates telling rather than showing. (A fan-fic writer might have a great time writing action-packed vignettes that reinvent the romantic relationships contained within this book. But I digress.) The overall story arc had potential, but took too long to get off the ground (see more on this under “Organization” below).
Word Choice-2. Although she used words such as wafting, cooed, and sartorial, I had the sense that she had originally written float, said, and tailored, then used a thesaurus when she realized she needed spicier words. Regarding profanity, I’m no prude, but I found the shock-value words thrown in as adjectives in the main characters’ dialogue to be somewhat unnatural, rather the way my seventh graders talk when they don’t know I overhear them. They seem to be practicing profanity so that by the time they are 17 or 18 years old they are really good at it . . . I had that same feeling whenever I ran into an instance of the f-word being used in this book.
Conventions-4. Yes, she knows how to spell correctly, capitalize, and use commas, periods, and question marks. Or if she doesn’t, there was an editor who fixed things up for her. Some of her sentences had rather tortured syntax--maybe that should be mentioned under sentence fluency, but I'm putting it here because a writer should know which words serve what purpose in their writing, and that amounts to understanding the conventions of writing in my mind.
Organization-2. Some Goodreads reviewers indicated the first third of this book seemed a little slow. I concur. Other reviewers mentioned their frustration with Froelich’s penchant for jumping from one character to another within the same chapter. I didn’t have a problem with this per se, as Froelich clearly delineates scenes within a chapter using the device of astrological forecasts as lead-ins to the upcoming action and focal character. However, the chapter divisions themselves seemed somewhat arbitrary. Furthermore, too much of the first third of the book was devoted to one of the characters (Penelope), so that it seemed she was initially intended to be the sole main character with Lipstick and Dana serving as secondary characters. As the stories of Lipstick and Dana were fleshed out in later chapters, it became clear to me that each of them was a main character, but their stories were developed too far into the book to make good sense, with their problems being somewhat too handily resolved. The final chapter of the book seemed to be more of an epilogue than a critical part of the story itself, with dreadfully poor writing of the told-rather-than-showed variety. The book didn’t need to be longer, just more tightly written in the first third to allow for adequate character development, plot resolution, and denouement.
Sentence Fluency-3. In six-trait analysis, a rating of 5 would be given for sentence fluency if the writing would sound great when read out loud, but that is definitely not the case with Mercury in Retrograde. Some of the rubrics I’ve used to grade papers on sentence fluency indicate that routine and functional sentence structure merits a rating of 3. A rating of 1 would be given if the sentences didn’t make grammatical sense, so I guess I really can’t go that low. But there were some sentences with convoluted structure, so a 3 seems generous. I’m probably setting the bar pretty low for a published work of entertainment to merit a mid-range score with merely routine and functional sentence structure, so this is a rather grudging 3.
Voice-2. Going back to rubrics for six-trait writing one more time, a rating of 3 is given if the writing is on the edge of being funny and if the writer’s personality pokes through here and there. Definitely, there are a few genuinely funny lines of dialogue, but most of the funny stuff in this book is poorly written slapstick (Marge, the NY Access blind-as-a-bat-hard-of-hearing receptionist, Penelope’s parents-by-telephone, for example). If I had found the book to be harder to put down either by virtue of the wit or the individuality of the writing, I might have rated voice a 3, but because there was so little in this book that was truly amusing or compelling I’m going with a 2.
The Goodreads blurb for this book describes the author as well-connected, which I believe, as I cannot imagine how this book would have been published (frankly, I can’t even imagine this book would have been given a read-through by an editor’s assistant) without those connections. Had one of my students written it, I would have thought it was not a bad effort, but then again, my students are twelve and thirteen years old. Although I have read (a lot of) other popular fiction that I have thoroughly enjoyed by authors with true talent, for this to make it into print truly makes me think it’s not what is written but who writes it that matters most in the world of popular publishing. Often I give away books after I have read them, especially if they are hardback, which my copy of this book is, but I’m inclined just to put this one in my recycle bin with that the hope that the paper it is printed on will be transformed into something else that is more readable.
When I grade my students’ writing, I use the six-trait model. Six aspects (or “traits”) of the writing are analyzed and rated on a scale of one to five (five being the best). The equation at the beginning of this review refers to the ratings I would give various traits of this book if I were to grade it the same way as I grade my students’ writing. Following are the rationales for each rating:
Ideas and Content-2. Given the genre of this book, Froelich did an adequate job of inventing diverse main characters—a journalist, a lawyer, and a socialite-cum-fashion designer—but then did little to make me like them or even remain interested in them. They seem to like each other mostly because intermediaries among them (the de rigueur gay guy friend and the equally obligatory-character-in-a-chick-lit-book-or-movie yoga instructor) say they should like each other. There is no moment of profundity, hilarity, or anxiety that allows us to see why they bond with each other. Most of the secondary characters are stereotypical (Marge, David, Neal, Trace, Bitsy, Jack, and Penelope’s characterization-by-telephone parents, to name a few). The romantic interests of the three main characters were underdeveloped. Froelich seemed incapable of writing a fun, romantic scene, preferring instead either to close the bedroom door on the characters or to have them exchange life stories. If there is anything worse than a writer who tells rather than shows, it is the character an author creates telling rather than showing. (A fan-fic writer might have a great time writing action-packed vignettes that reinvent the romantic relationships contained within this book. But I digress.) The overall story arc had potential, but took too long to get off the ground (see more on this under “Organization” below).
Word Choice-2. Although she used words such as wafting, cooed, and sartorial, I had the sense that she had originally written float, said, and tailored, then used a thesaurus when she realized she needed spicier words. Regarding profanity, I’m no prude, but I found the shock-value words thrown in as adjectives in the main characters’ dialogue to be somewhat unnatural, rather the way my seventh graders talk when they don’t know I overhear them. They seem to be practicing profanity so that by the time they are 17 or 18 years old they are really good at it . . . I had that same feeling whenever I ran into an instance of the f-word being used in this book.
Conventions-4. Yes, she knows how to spell correctly, capitalize, and use commas, periods, and question marks. Or if she doesn’t, there was an editor who fixed things up for her. Some of her sentences had rather tortured syntax--maybe that should be mentioned under sentence fluency, but I'm putting it here because a writer should know which words serve what purpose in their writing, and that amounts to understanding the conventions of writing in my mind.
Organization-2. Some Goodreads reviewers indicated the first third of this book seemed a little slow. I concur. Other reviewers mentioned their frustration with Froelich’s penchant for jumping from one character to another within the same chapter. I didn’t have a problem with this per se, as Froelich clearly delineates scenes within a chapter using the device of astrological forecasts as lead-ins to the upcoming action and focal character. However, the chapter divisions themselves seemed somewhat arbitrary. Furthermore, too much of the first third of the book was devoted to one of the characters (Penelope), so that it seemed she was initially intended to be the sole main character with Lipstick and Dana serving as secondary characters. As the stories of Lipstick and Dana were fleshed out in later chapters, it became clear to me that each of them was a main character, but their stories were developed too far into the book to make good sense, with their problems being somewhat too handily resolved. The final chapter of the book seemed to be more of an epilogue than a critical part of the story itself, with dreadfully poor writing of the told-rather-than-showed variety. The book didn’t need to be longer, just more tightly written in the first third to allow for adequate character development, plot resolution, and denouement.
Sentence Fluency-3. In six-trait analysis, a rating of 5 would be given for sentence fluency if the writing would sound great when read out loud, but that is definitely not the case with Mercury in Retrograde. Some of the rubrics I’ve used to grade papers on sentence fluency indicate that routine and functional sentence structure merits a rating of 3. A rating of 1 would be given if the sentences didn’t make grammatical sense, so I guess I really can’t go that low. But there were some sentences with convoluted structure, so a 3 seems generous. I’m probably setting the bar pretty low for a published work of entertainment to merit a mid-range score with merely routine and functional sentence structure, so this is a rather grudging 3.
Voice-2. Going back to rubrics for six-trait writing one more time, a rating of 3 is given if the writing is on the edge of being funny and if the writer’s personality pokes through here and there. Definitely, there are a few genuinely funny lines of dialogue, but most of the funny stuff in this book is poorly written slapstick (Marge, the NY Access blind-as-a-bat-hard-of-hearing receptionist, Penelope’s parents-by-telephone, for example). If I had found the book to be harder to put down either by virtue of the wit or the individuality of the writing, I might have rated voice a 3, but because there was so little in this book that was truly amusing or compelling I’m going with a 2.
The Goodreads blurb for this book describes the author as well-connected, which I believe, as I cannot imagine how this book would have been published (frankly, I can’t even imagine this book would have been given a read-through by an editor’s assistant) without those connections. Had one of my students written it, I would have thought it was not a bad effort, but then again, my students are twelve and thirteen years old. Although I have read (a lot of) other popular fiction that I have thoroughly enjoyed by authors with true talent, for this to make it into print truly makes me think it’s not what is written but who writes it that matters most in the world of popular publishing. Often I give away books after I have read them, especially if they are hardback, which my copy of this book is, but I’m inclined just to put this one in my recycle bin with that the hope that the paper it is printed on will be transformed into something else that is more readable.
July 19, 2009
If you're a devoted follower of the New York Post's Page 6, you'll probably devour this semi-entertaining, albeit predictable, tale of twentysomethings in the city. Sloppy syntax, shallow characters, and a story that doesn't get started until almost a third of the way through, however, will test every one else's attention. So will Lipstick's silly name. (Do you really want to read about a protagonist named after a cosmetic?) Granted, the title refers to a planetary phenomenon, but it's never properly explained or integrated into the plot. Moreover, the "horror"scopes scattered through out the novel are confusing for people who don't normally check theirs and downright irritating for astrology buffs. Mercury must have been in retrograde when this novel was edited. Pass me the Post instead.
July 17, 2009
i don't know what i expected-- it was written by the woman who edits page 6. it's cute... but i feel like i'm dumber now.
May 28, 2009
have to admit, I was a little skeptical of a book with a main character named Lipstick, but Paula Froelich won me over with this juicy, fun read that's perfect for anyone who's ever lived in New York, worked a crappy job, had their family expect too much of them, or had relationship troubles. In other words, everyone. Riffing on the world she knows well, Froelich has reporter Penelope Mercury running all over the city under horrible conditions, only to be fired and wind up with one of the craziest bosses in the world. Meanwhile, rich girl Lipstick splits off from her wealthy family and must "slum it" (yes, at an address many of us would kill for). Dana, the lawyer, seems stuck in a dead-end job while still mourning the death of her marriage.
The three neighbors wind up doing much more than yoga together, supporting each other through Lipstick's stalker, Penelope's stint as a TV Easter Bunny, and Dana's decisions about what truly matters to her. The most fun story line by far winds up being, yes, Lipstick's, armed as she is with a nemesis who's stolen her boyfriend, a self-created fashion mystery, and a budding romance. This is a perfect summer read that'll win you over with its in many ways innocent charm (if you're expecting hot and heavy bedroom scenes, they're not here, though there is plenty of flirting). Perfect for your beach bag (or subway commute!).
The three neighbors wind up doing much more than yoga together, supporting each other through Lipstick's stalker, Penelope's stint as a TV Easter Bunny, and Dana's decisions about what truly matters to her. The most fun story line by far winds up being, yes, Lipstick's, armed as she is with a nemesis who's stolen her boyfriend, a self-created fashion mystery, and a budding romance. This is a perfect summer read that'll win you over with its in many ways innocent charm (if you're expecting hot and heavy bedroom scenes, they're not here, though there is plenty of flirting). Perfect for your beach bag (or subway commute!).
June 27, 2009
It was odd when I received the ARC for this title because it had an entirely different cover than the one you see pictured here. What they did for the promotional copy was to use quotes from the blurbs different writers wrote about the title. Clever but confusing for me because when I saw the cover I expected an entirely different kind of book!
But, that said, I enjoyed this book and it was fast reading. I'm sure both my sister or sister-in-law who read a lot will enjoy this too. Another odd aspect of this novel is that it took a while for the three women characters to come together in the same apartment building. (I only knew this plot point ahead of time from reading another review since my copy didn't have the apartment building on the cover the one this one does!) At that point the story started to jell a bit more.
And who helps them to get together? Why the gay male designer friend of Lena magically brings the trio together.
Is it predictable? Yes. But it kept me interested so that's saying something. I especially liked the story arc of the lawyer, Dana Gluck. She was the most interesting to me.
But, that said, I enjoyed this book and it was fast reading. I'm sure both my sister or sister-in-law who read a lot will enjoy this too. Another odd aspect of this novel is that it took a while for the three women characters to come together in the same apartment building. (I only knew this plot point ahead of time from reading another review since my copy didn't have the apartment building on the cover the one this one does!) At that point the story started to jell a bit more.
And who helps them to get together? Why the gay male designer friend of Lena magically brings the trio together.
Is it predictable? Yes. But it kept me interested so that's saying something. I especially liked the story arc of the lawyer, Dana Gluck. She was the most interesting to me.
November 5, 2009
It was a piece of crap. BUT, I secretly enjoyed it cuz I need something easy to read during my challenging workouts. Three chicks, separate lives brought together by one hipster apartment building in Manhattan. There were actually a few glimmers of funny but overall, just another smarmy chic lit book that doesn't make the grade. Dammit.
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November 22, 2010It was dreck. The author clearly doesn't have much faith in the intelligence of her readers. And, yes, I went into reading this thinking that it would be a nice, simple, frothy trifle of escapism. Instead, it read like a stilted cross-hybrid of chick lit and the Dick and Jane series.
May 9, 2023
"I lost twenty pounds in two weeks--at that rate you can be practically Somalian by the Met Gala, darling!"
I'm definitely not in this book's target audience, which is probably why I pretty regularly felt myself mentally glazing over a little when words such as "hunkalicious" or "manorexic" came up, or sentences such as this one: "The crush was turning out to literally be a crash...." Ugh. Also, the editing is routinely a little sloppy. But the book does have heart. The first 75 pages or so reminded me of a grown-up version of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day as it followed three women, ages 27, 28, and 32, all from different social stations and, with the exception of yoga, all mainly with different interests, going through one long, crappy day that eventually results in their becoming neighbors in a Soho tenement. The book's climax is worth getting to, and the denouement, while for sure a bit saccharine, still works.
First line:
"Penelope Mercury hadn't meant to quit her job without another one waiting in the wings."
May 30, 2011
Initially I really didn't like the book, maybe the fact that the word p@nis all ready appeared at the bottom of the first page, to me chick lit is supposed to be warm and fun, fuzzy and hilarious with a real sparkle and this felt like a narrative of the characters and why their lives are so whacky. Once I got into the book more I was laughing at some parts, especially when the meeting at Y magazine where Lena Lippencrass works ( socialite wanna be) was going over latest beauty trends and the words "pig embryo cream" popped up, now that was funny, I saw some comedic brilliance there. Overall I don't like chick lit books that read like an issue of Star magazine or In Touch or Us weekly...the writing here wasn't as strong, it felt a little rushed and not as lush and well rounded, I guess I compare all chick lit books to the authors that I all ready love, such as Emily Giffin or Marian Keyes, and so many these days are just okay, a passable way to pass time, but when I favor going to sleep early over reading a book then I know it's the book that's at fault, usually I forgo beauty sleep for reading, which matters to me more. The author was adding horoscope readings for each damsel in distress, kinda weird and distracting to me, it told me nothing that I couldn't guess all ready...
Overall this is a cute story, with some colorful characters and funny situations but it took me a while to warm up to it, if it wasn't a Vine book I would probably give up and not finish, but I dislike to leave things unread unless they really suck. I had a hard time relating to the main characters or Penelope, Lena and Dana because they looked more like characters in a book than real people, each one was a bit cookie cutter and separate from the other, I think whether someone's richer or poorer, a snob or a passive snail, they all share characteristics and are similar in some ways, here they were all clearly very different, merely parts in a play.
Overall this is a cute story, with some colorful characters and funny situations but it took me a while to warm up to it, if it wasn't a Vine book I would probably give up and not finish, but I dislike to leave things unread unless they really suck. I had a hard time relating to the main characters or Penelope, Lena and Dana because they looked more like characters in a book than real people, each one was a bit cookie cutter and separate from the other, I think whether someone's richer or poorer, a snob or a passive snail, they all share characteristics and are similar in some ways, here they were all clearly very different, merely parts in a play.
November 18, 2013
I stopped reading chick-lit after I graduated college. None of the books on the shelves had stories that appealed to me anymore. They were all rehashings of the same girl-meets-boy-communication-fails-hilarity-and-awkwardness-ensues story. The tried-and-true chick-lit authors no longer appealed to me, either. I simply dropped the genre altogether. I gave Mercury in Retrograde a chance simply because it was recommended by a feminist site I read. It's an easy read and the characters are approachable and endearing. You want them each to succeed and to become better people by the end of the book. It was rather silly how the 3 disparate women finally connected somewhere halfway through the story, but it worked. I liked the humor and thought the development of each woman was done well. I cheered for Lipstick at the end, but I felt Penelope could've done without a romantic ending. Yeah, there were plenty of the chick-lit staples: fashion sense (or nonsense, depending on the character), working woman who "loses" her husband because of her career, a rich girl disowned by her socialite parents for not doing what they want, etc. These are tried-and-true chick list tropes and they seem to work here. In the end, each character is a better person (on the outside and inside) and make their lives what they want, despite what others feel they should. A great beach read or perfect companion for a relaxing weekend.
June 24, 2009
Yet another NYC chick-lit name-dropping frothy book.
Not terrible, but it is what it is.
Not as good as Tatiana Boncampagni for the same flavor, quite like Lauren Weisberger, but infinitely better than the loathsome Candace Bushnell, whose whore-oines have been inexplicably misunderstood as some kind of warped symbols of female empowerment.
It made a decent bath book, if you ignore some absolute howlers in the writing.
Not terrible, but it is what it is.
Not as good as Tatiana Boncampagni for the same flavor, quite like Lauren Weisberger, but infinitely better than the loathsome Candace Bushnell, whose whore-oines have been inexplicably misunderstood as some kind of warped symbols of female empowerment.
It made a decent bath book, if you ignore some absolute howlers in the writing.
November 5, 2014
Apart from the author's obvious disdain of the state of Ohio, her misguided use of words like "tranny" and "she-male," even in casual conversation, were enough to make me quit this book.
July 22, 2017
I didn't get very far into reading Mercury in Retrograde. I grabbed it because of the title--after all, anyone knows that when Mercury is in retrograde, everything and anything can and usually will go badly: plans, ideas, communications, relationships....
But the three main female characters were dry and uninteresting and, worst of all, each seemed to have different names--nicknames, shortening of their birth name as well as their birth name--and when you're trying to learn who each character is, it becomes difficult to follow without a flow-chart.
I grabbed the book on a whim, but put it down on purpose. Didn't seem to be worth it.
But the three main female characters were dry and uninteresting and, worst of all, each seemed to have different names--nicknames, shortening of their birth name as well as their birth name--and when you're trying to learn who each character is, it becomes difficult to follow without a flow-chart.
I grabbed the book on a whim, but put it down on purpose. Didn't seem to be worth it.
June 17, 2019
Three women who live in the same apartment building form an unlikely friendship and help one another through some challenging times.
This was a fun, light read. I picked it up thinking it would have more astrological references, however apart from the ‘daily horoscope’ type sentences separating the character sections there wasn’t anything that would satisfy an astrology enthusiast.
For me, it missed some vital character development. The three women met.....and suddenly were friends. How did this happen? I felt the reader was told that they were friends rather than shown it. If is a good ‘beach read’ if you’re after something easy, but it’s unlikely to leave a lasting impression on you.
This was a fun, light read. I picked it up thinking it would have more astrological references, however apart from the ‘daily horoscope’ type sentences separating the character sections there wasn’t anything that would satisfy an astrology enthusiast.
For me, it missed some vital character development. The three women met.....and suddenly were friends. How did this happen? I felt the reader was told that they were friends rather than shown it. If is a good ‘beach read’ if you’re after something easy, but it’s unlikely to leave a lasting impression on you.
September 24, 2020
3 1/2 stars. When Mercury is in retrograde anything that can go wrong will! Penelope is hoping to be a court reporter but when a disaster happens she is fired. Lena is a socialite at a fashion magazine with unlimited funds from her rich father who suddenly cuts her off when she won’t work in the family business and Dana is a workaholic lawyer coming off a divorce who’s become a recluse. They all end up at a building at 198 Sullivan in Soho. Their friendship produces results none of them could have ever imagined. This was a fun read.
July 13, 2023
Yes, it's a predictable chick-lit novel, and in many ways a real hoot. I for one had a great time reading it and almost laughed out loud at some of it. Don't take this one too seriously, for if you think you need to, then for certain you'll give it a low rating. Lipstick, Penelope, Dana, three NYC women who have nothing, yet so much in common and become friends practically from the beginning when they start taking yoga together. We journey with the three of them as they eventually become self-assured career women. I enjoyed taking the "trip" with them.
December 18, 2024
Read it for what I believe it was intended to be... easy, breezy, chic-lit. When the news is beyond depressing a cute little escape into an easy read, filled with trivial problems, is just the ticket.
Not sure if anyone else was bothered by the cover art, depicting 198 Sullivan Street in NYC (which is a fictitious address). In the book Froelich described the building as a 5-story, 4-window-wide walk-up tenement. The cover art shows a 4-story, 5 window-wide. It doesn't really matter but it makes me wonder how no one caught that error before going to print.
Not sure if anyone else was bothered by the cover art, depicting 198 Sullivan Street in NYC (which is a fictitious address). In the book Froelich described the building as a 5-story, 4-window-wide walk-up tenement. The cover art shows a 4-story, 5 window-wide. It doesn't really matter but it makes me wonder how no one caught that error before going to print.
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July 7, 2020Mercury in Retrograde is an NY entertainment column version of Sophie Kinsella's books. This book deals with how women find unlikely friendships while navigating through the woes and triumphs of finding the career that works for them. Each chapter has its own astrological foreshadowing which makes it somehow entertaining but the storytelling itself can get bland sometimes. It was a worthwhile read though if you want to read a book in one sitting only.
June 2, 2022
Perfect summer read! A more relatable and funny 'The Devil Wears Prada.' A great fun story replete with realistic and hilarious depictions of what it is like to work in print and broadcast media and fashion. The through-line is the constant New York cycle of picking yourself up when the Universe is knocking you down, and the people who help you do so. Smiled throughout and enjoyed the ending hugely.
April 4, 2024
Thank goodness this book is over. It’s by far my least favorite book of the year thus far. It glamorizes eating disorders and using derogatory terms associated with them flippantly. Similarly, it perpetuates diet culture and constantly has characters fat shaming themselves or others. The frequent misuse of semicolons is embarrassing. The author uses extremely offensive terms, including the R-word more than once. This book being written fifteen years ago isn’t an excuse for any of this.
February 12, 2018
Improved after a rough start. I disliked two characters immediately and the name brand dropping reminded me of the worst type of chick-lit, but I loved the description of Penelope as a peptobismal Michelan man. The book improved after the first third. I listened to the audiobook and the narration added to my enjoyment of the story.
August 24, 2022
I thought the first few sections were confusing. I couldn’t figure out what was going on or how many characters were being talked about. But then figured it out. There were a few grammatical errors which drove me insane to the point that I didn’t read the book for a few days because I was annoyed. But overall, the story is cute. Predictable but happy ending for all.
December 12, 2023
this was an extremely odd book that was kinda all over the place but surprisingly enjoyable. the writing was a little wacky at times, especially the dialogue, and the use of the r word was totally unnecessary. everything all came together in the end. 3.2
August 31, 2018
3.5
I liked the message behind it: every bad thing that happens to you is for a reason you don't spot with your small eye now
I liked the message behind it: every bad thing that happens to you is for a reason you don't spot with your small eye now
November 21, 2019
* Read for the '2019 PopSugar Reading Challenge' task: A book with a zodiac sign or astrology term in the title
January 27, 2020
Audiobook.
February 25, 2020
I loved this book. Light reading and uplifting. Women helping women. Excellent escape.
May 26, 2020
Fun, quick read with this book! Perfect beach/vacation read!
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