The Best Laid Plans

October 4, 2010
Schnurnberger (The Botox Diaries, with Janice Kaplan) goes solo for a middle-age crazy tale of Tru—a stay-at-her-Park-Avenue-home-mom of twin teens whose husband loses his job in the financial meltdown—and glam sidekick Sienna, a TV anchor kicked to the curb for a younger face. The resourceful gals cook up a wacky plan to keep themselves in lipstick and lingerie: an escort agency specializing in well-bred over-40 "courtesans." It's a hit, and along the way, Tru competes to keep her husband; deals with her irrepressible mom, Naomi (a former Miss New York Subway), after her life-changing heart attack; and discovers her daughters are competing for the same wicked eighth-grade heartthrob. The multigenerational antics of this light, enjoyable romp are safely PG, as is the message: true love (or is it Tru's loves?) conquers all.

October 15, 2010

A financially strapped Upper East Side lady-who-lunches launches an escort service employing only women over 40 in this unfunny novel from Schnurnberger (co-author: The Men I Didn't Marry, 2007, etc.).

The name-dropping, of both brands (Ambien) and celebrities (Mayor Bloomberg, Jay-Z), begins on the first page as wealthy matron Tru Newman throws a disastrous benefit soiree at the Museum of Natural History. Shortly after the tainted appetizers send guests running to the exits, Tru learns that her husband Peter has been laid off from his job as an investment banker. How will they afford their penthouse apartment and the tuition for the private school their twin 14-year-old daughters attend? Not to mention the Botox injections (by the author's actual dermatologist). When Tru's best friend Sienna, also out of work as a newscaster, refuses the check Peter's young lawyer Bill offers her as a gift after a romantic tryst, Tru has an epiphany: There's an open niche in the escort industry—successful young men like Bill who are drawn to sophisticated older women. Tru, Bill and Sienna open the Veronica Agency, named after a 16th-century courtesan, but Tru neglects to tell Peter, who begins working for their sexy new neighbor Tiffany, a business owner. The success of the Veronica Agency does not mitigate Tru's growing suspicion that Tiffany has romantic designs on Peter. Soon Tru's 72-year-old mother Naomi, a former Miss Subway, suffers a minor heart attack and the twins join forces against a two-timing eighth-grade Romeo. After a marital spat, Peter leaves on a ten-day business trip with Tiffany to Hawaii. But not to worry—by the night of Naomi's Miss Subways' reunion, where Cher plays an inexplicable cameo, Peter and Tru have rediscovered marital bliss, Sienna and Bill have found new love, and so has Naomi with her first suitor. As for the Veronica Agency, Tru realizes she wouldn't want her daughters working there.

A distasteful mix of flat one-liners, sexual innuendo, base materialism and sentimentality.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 1, 2010
Tru Newman has an enviable life, a famous best friend, a wealthy husband, and well-behaved twin daughters. Her biggest problem to date is living in the shadow of her overbearing ex-beauty-queen mother. All of that comes to a crashing halt when Tru discovers that her husband has been secretly unemployed for more than three months. When the economy crashes, Tru is forced to go back to work and chooses an unlikely profession: she starts a call-girl service featuring women over 40. Trus travails are told in a light, breezy tone combined with an endless stream of up-to-the-minute pop-culture references. A deeper novel might try and make connections between Trus work as a madam and her husbands work as an investment banker, but this frothy tale is pure wish fulfillment. After all, although the novel is clearly set in 2010, Tru lives in a world where long-term married couples easily forgive major betrayals to have hot sex in the elevator, young men pay to sleep with fortysomething women, and Cher arrives at a reunion to make everyones problems disappear.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)