Mercury in Retrograde

It sounds like a movie pitch: Three smart, opinionated young women live in the same Manhattan building and band together to improve each other's personal and social lives. Mixed in is a heady dose of brand names, celebrity name-dropping, and working-girl dialogue. Written by a gossip columnist, this project sounds like the ultimate in chick-lit. Alas, there's plenty of "chick" but not much "lit." With such larger-than-life characters, one would expect that Marguerite Gavin would have a lot to work with in her narration. While she makes a valiant attempt to inject some sass and attitude into her delivery, ultimately it doesn't redeem an unsatisfying book. Fans of Candace Bushnell may enjoy this--others, beware. R.W.S. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

May 4, 2009
Three down-on-their-luck Manhattan women form an unlikely fellowship in Page Six deputy editor Froelich's formulaic—though sometimes funny—debut. Anxious socialite Lena Lippencrass, smalltown transplant–cum–intrepid reporter Penelope Mercury and high-powered lawyer Dana Gluck end up in the same former SoHo tenement building at low points in their lives: Lena, cut off by her wealthy parents, is slumming it on Sullivan Street; Penelope is out of a job after accidentally damaging her office's property; and Dana lives on Weight Watchers while obsessing over her divorce. But once they band together, they right themselves while helping each other. After an initial barrage of New York names and places (and an abundance of parenthetical asides), the novel eventually finds a breezy groove as it traipses through TV newsrooms, high-stakes partnership meetings and a fashion gala at the Met, leading to comically fitting results—and new love interests—for each. Froelich takes a few light shots at socialite Web sites, politicians in prostitution scandals, fashion magazines and drug-addled young celebrities, and the book's message of rejecting gossip and hierarchy is sweetly unexpected, even if everything else is by the numbers.