Daisy Dooley Does Divorce

August 6, 2007
The title is a hint of what to expect in this frustrating traipse through divorcedom from the great niece of that guy who wrote Dr. Zhivago
. Originally released in the U.K. as the novelization of Pasternak's Daily Mail
column, the novel stars Daisy Dooley, a 39-year-old “dopey divorcée” searching for a man unlike the “dodgy men with dire agendas” that dominated her past. Since Daisy stopped working to please her husband, she now lives with her mother and her dachsunds named Dougie, Donald, Dominic, Doughnut, Des, Deborah, Desdemona, Diandra, Dennis, Dusty and so on. She has the inevitable “girlie gossip and giggle” with her married friend Lucy and her commitment-phobic pal Jess. Then there's her best male friend, Miles, a “rollickingly rich” philanderer. As Daisy plunges into the dating pool, looking up old flames and embarking on disastrous affairs, Pasternak eventually gets into the meat of a conventional chick-lit story, but by then it's too late to reverse the uneasy feeling that another annoying alliterative bomb will explode. (It will.) There are enough dopey characters to populate a sitcom (one is currently in development with ABC), but the reading experience is less than exhilarating.

October 15, 2007
For Daisy Dooley, every petal she pulls off means he loves me. Or atleast she wishes it did. Thirty-nine, childless, and recently divorced, Daisy is an eternal optimist and hopeless romantic, buoying herself up in this difficult time with her three best friends, professor father, plenty of Mums home cooking, and stacks upon stacks of self-help books. Unfortunately, its hard to keep the buoy afloat andromanticism intact when one friend urges her into no-strings-attached sex, another friend is considering having an affair with their sexy male friend, Mum has a boyfriend while you dont, your father doesnt hear a word you say, and all your postdivorce dates dont quite measure up to the one that got away who has suddenly reappeared. None of this isaddressed in any of those self-help books. Written in the same gossipy style as its chick-lit predecessors, this deceptively cheerful novel deals with serious topics rarely approached in the genre, while still supplying a crowd-pleasing, fairy-tale ending.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)