The premise of Lauren Weisenberger?s 2nd writing venture after her wildly successful first book, The Devil Wears Prada, unfolds like taking the most perilous ride at the amusement park--nausea assured. Bette Robinson, the 27 year old heroine of Everyone Worth Knowing abruptly quits her grueling 80 hour a week-climbing-the-income-ladder-corporate banking job she?s held and despised for 5 years. Suddenly, she finds she?s got some time on her hands, until her affluent 60 year old, gay, influential, conservative columnist uncle sets her up in a public relations job planning parties for the rich and famous.
Although Bette knows nothing about party planning, she discovers, much to her delight and revulsion, she?s not only good at juggling the demands of her new job, she becomes the center of a false media swirl surrounding herself and one of New York?s most eligible bachelors. At first Bette?s comfortable enough allowing the media to hype invented scenarios about her love life,earning her recognition from her trendy new colleagues and her ever appreciative Diet Coke swilling boss.
The book weaves through a series of whirlwind events surrounding Bette in her current ?see and be seen? job. There is the late-night partying, the endless parade of rail thin women with augmented or reduced body parts, the movie stars, the metro sexual men, the back-stabbers, the social climbers, the drug taking. Bette, ever the observer and rarely the participant, becomes worn down and predictably, given the speed of her new lifestyle, somewhere along the way she experiences a meltdown. It appears as if Bette never sleeps, never walks her dog, and she hasn?t had a boyfriend in an excruciatingly long time. Bette repeatedly admits to feeling awkward, not fast-enough thinking on her feet, not socially clever enough. She is, by all her accounts, the brave warrior suffering mishap after mishap.
This reader hoped to discover in the writing?s ever-escalating tempo, the book would be funny. But, Lauren Weisenberger does not write funny. She writes whiny.
Events go awry, blunders and viciousness spiral upwards, until, at last, all is right by the end of the book with its inevitable comeuppances. The bad people are left in the dust, while the good ones rise to the top. The book succeeds at being an agitated and restless modern fairytale even in its rare moments of rest. This glossy, hyperactive, Botox-book is much like flipping through People Magazine while waiting in the supermarket line. Lot?s of stars and name-dropping and surface stuff, and in the end, all fluff.
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