Catching Alice

October 30, 2000
If not as devastatingly funny as her debut novel, Love: A User's Guide, Naylor still dispatches her Britwit well in this Alice in Wonderland tale with a twist. Poor beleaguered Londoner Alice Lewis, 26, has lost her flat, her cheating boyfriend and her job all in the space of a fortnight. So when Tash, an American friend from her schoolgirl days, visits London and hears Alice's plight, she offers the frumpy ingenue a chance to regroup in Los Angeles. Under Tash's wing, and in spite of her self-doubt, Alice needs only one wheatgrass shake, some positive thinking, a crash course in California lingo and a few extra-firm handshakes to succeed the all-American way: she loses weight and is a smash as a publicist to the stars. She's even got her own stalker, much to the chagrin of jealous starlets who wish they had one. Touched by the presents he leaves for her, Alice secretly thinks her stalker is more mystery admirer than menace, and wonders if they will ever meet. The anonymous--to Alice, but not the reader--suitor is an exuberantly romantic, Irish theatrical director named Patrick Wilde, who has followed Alice across the pond because he's fallen in love from afar with her unassuming nature. Two subplots are hardly worth the reader's attention--one involving Tash and a married man, the other Alice's cousin Simon and diamond smugglers. But main character Alice is perky and engaging, and her loopy humor is the perfect foil for "the artifice capital of the world."

November 1, 2000
Naylor's second novel reinvents " Alice in Won"derland by plunking dumpy, brokenhearted Alice Lewis into the heart of the Los Angeles celebrity culture. When Alice flees London to escape the constant reminders of a broken relationship with an English heel, she finds L.A. a strange Wonderland indeed. Surrounded by a weird amalgam of lethally beautiful women and perverse men, Alice lands a job in a P.R. agency, and her coworkers add yet another dimension of lunacy to this Mad Hatter's tea party. This is a world populated with the ruthless, the mindless, and the physically flawless, and Naylor filters the triple obsessions of health, beauty, and sex through her heroine's somewhat phlegmatic sensibility. The sole even vaguely sensible character is Lysette Jackson, a southern transplant determined to find an English husband with a title and a castle. Naylor has fun in this send-up--surely only in Los Angeles would old-fashioned wooing with chocolates, flowers, and love notes be interpreted as stalking--and her readers will, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)