Boy Meets Girl

Kate MacKenzie's life is kind of sucking. She just broke up with the only guy she's ever been with, her loser boyfriend Dale, who despite being with Kate for some 10 years can't muster a real committment. Now she's living on her best friend's couch and working as a Human Resources Rep for a Tyrannical Office Despot (T.O.D.). If all that isn't bad enough, Kate has to fire the lovable Mrs. Lopez, her office's dessert-maker who happens to have some rigid moral concerns about who is worthy of her desserts. When she's involved in Mrs. Lopez's wrongful termination lawsuit she finds herself falling in love (lust?) with the company's despicable (or is he?) lawyer.

Though the book is told entirely through e-mail, voice mail messages, notes show more written on receipts, journal entries, and the like, Cabot manages to use these things to help you get to know and love her characters (or hate them, as required for some, of course). Sure the characters are exaggerated...the good ones very, very good and the bad ones quite absurdly miserable, but Kate and her foibles are laugh out loud funny. It's pretty obvious how things will turn out, but that doesn't keep you from rooting for her as she struggles to act like a normal person in front of the guy she likes, deal with the T.O.D., and find an affordable apartment in Manhattan not on the same block as a methadone clinic. All in all - a ridiculous but lovable tale that kept me laughing.

Leafing Through Life show less

Fluffy, fluffy, fluffy! Told through a mix of journal entries, instant messages, notes on scrap paper, voice mails, etc, Cabot allows the reader put the pieces together herself. It's not a very difficult puzzle, but the gimmick is sort of fun. Summer reading at it's best. I did sort of miss "witnessing" actually encounters. The ENTIRE story is told in the aforementioned manner, none of it is told through regular conversations. Interesting, but not overly sustainable (although this is the second in a "series," I see!)

In a continuing "series*" of modern epistolary romances, we have added IM conversations to the mix, and journals kept mostly on scrap paper. Again we have a recently jilted protagonist who bumps into an extremely eligible bachelor only in this book, over the course of a fortnight they interact maybe four times for maybe an hour each time. But they still manage to fall madly and deeply in love, overcoming several obstacles (each of them dealing with their families and their work, but not particularly with each other or each others' families 'cause they never actually spend time together) in the process. Yeah.

The story isn't nearly as strong as the first book, "Boy Next Door" and mostly seems to serve as a way to peripherally catch up on show more the lives of the supporting cast from the first book.

That said, I thought that the addition of the IM conversations was a great addition to the emails. We didn't need any "oh, I overheard you talking and..." emails this time to forward the plot :o) The journaling also gave a good balance of exposition that you wouldn't necessarily email even to your best friend and "I'm writing this while waiting, on the only scrap of paper I could find" was well done.

* with subsequent employees of the same newspaper staff falling in love and telling their also-employed-by-the-newspaper, engaged best friend all about it show less

This book does a whole story without narrative, it's all written communication, whether on paper or electronically, and it's brilliant. I loved the easy, direct language and the fastness of the read (one very short session is all it took to get through this). The story was nothing original, but well told and enjoyable enough, mainly because of the excellent and mercifully small cast.

I loved the style of this, a modern epistolatory romance using IM, email, and diary entries.
But I found it hard to empathise with the main characters, I found them silly and immature considering the career positions and life experience they supposedly held.
Towards the end, although the characters become more well rounded, I found the nasty incidents of racism and homophobia jarring in the fluffy context.

The stories in Meg Cabot's Boy series are told through a series of emails, journal entries, and other various scraps. This allows the reader to view events through various perspectives, which is particularly helpful in this book, because the deuteragonist is keeping a secret from the protagonist. Though I usually really enjoy reading Cabot's work, despite the predictable and typically obvious plot-lines, this book was less enjoyable. It read like any other disaster chick-lit book: boy agrees to keep someone's secret, boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, secret stands in the way, girl finds out secret, girl hates boy, boy does something amazing, girl loves boy. The ending also felt a little hasty and contrived.

Meet Kate Mackenzie. She:

22works for the T.O.D. (short for Tyrannical Office Despot, also known as Amy Jenkins, Director of the Human Resources Division at the New York Journal)
22is sleeping on the couch because her boyfriend of ten years refuses to commit
22can't find an affordable studio apartment anywhere in New York City
22thinks things can't get any worse.
They can. Because:

22the T.O.D. is making her fire the most popular employee in the paper's senior staff dining room
22that employee is now suing Kate for wrongful termination, and
22now Kate has to give a deposition in front of Mitch Hertzog, the scion of one of Manhattan's wealthiest law families, who embraces everything Kate most despises ... but also happens to have a nice show more smile and a killer bod.
The last thing anybody 14least of all Kate Mackenzie 14expects to find in a legal arbitration is love. But that's the kind of thing that can happen when ... Boy Meets Girl. show less