Fashionably Late

Well, I finally met a book I couldn't finish. Nadine Dajani's Fashionably Late sounded like a cute chick lit novel. I picked it up for my latest gym book. The flap copy talked about quarter-life crises, a girl who fails her accounting exam and decides to go to Cuba instead of the trip to Cancun she planned with her colleagues, then, of course, figures out the meaning to life . . . Except I couldn't get past page 40.

First, the brand-name-dropping started to annoy me . . . Christian Laboutin this and Stila that . . . Then, as her boyfriend is proposing and she finds herself unsure how to answer, the main character accuses him of being selfish for proposing when she's waiting to hear the results of her big accounting exam. Then, as if it weren't doomed already, the nail in the coffin: our heroine reveals that she's 22 years old. I almost flung the book across the room from my perch on the elliptical. (My friend and coworker was on the machine in front of me, so I resisted.) Maybe it was bad writing, or maybe I'm just getting old, but I just didn't care about this adolescent's problems!

It's too bad, too. The book has a great cover--as you can see! The dark red and sky blue on the spine is my favorite color combination. Plus, the writer had the most thoughtful opening to her acknowledgments I've ever seen: "A book sitting on a shelf in a store may seem like any other commodity, a thing to be bought and sold. But to those who write, a book is a dream at the end of a long road, one I might have strayed from were it not for the many people who believed in me." Unfortunately, the heroine of the novel was not nearly as thoughtful as the author. Oh well, onwards and upwards. At least this gets a book off my list!