Blargh, I'd been having such good luck with Goodreads Choice finalists.I really should have put it down after page two, when the female, working-class narrator describes her roommate as follows:
"Eve was one of those surprising beauties from the American Midwest.
In New York it becomes so easy to assume that the city's most alluring women have flown in from Paris or Milan. But they're just a minority. A much larger covey hails from the stalwart states that begin with the letter I--like Iowa or Indiana or Illinois. Bred with just the right amount of fresh air, roughhousing, and ignorance, these primative blondes set out from the cornfields looking like starlight with limbs. Every morning in the spring one of them skips off her porch with a sandwich wrapped in cellophane ready to flag down the first Greyhound headed to Manhattan--this city where all things beautiful are welcomed and measured if, if not immediately adopted, then at least tried on for size."
You know, maybe you shouldn't write your debut novel in the first person from the POV of a character of the opposite gender from yourself? Let alone a different time period and socioeconomic (and educational) background? Just a thought?
Well, I kept going. For 129 pages. Until I realized there was no plot. Just lots of drinking, and pretentious talk about art and such.
Also, by the time I quit, the main character had coincidentally run into someone while out and about at least 5 times. I thought New York City was a bit bigger than that?
But, I admit, I hated The Great Gatsby, which this has been compared to.
But at least Nick Carraway was convincingly male.
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