Ladies with Options
This entry was posted on 7/28/2006 6:45 PM and is filed under Books.
Just finished Ladies with Options, by Cynthia Hartwick.
It was amusing and cute but that's about it. The story was kinda fun, but so easy. Who couldn't manufacture a story in 2005 in which a bunch of middle aged ladies buy Microsoft in 1983?
The story itself was cute, which isn't the best thing you can say about a book. I give Ms. Hartwick points for trying to be amusing but she's no Janet Evanovich and the only thing her herione, Sophia Peters has in common with Stephanie Plum is initials.
Perhaps she'll get better with more experience and perhaps a good editor could improve her work tremendously but she needs something. The story was told all in flash back, as though it all happened years ago, which took a lot of the fun out of it. Hartwick also had trouble creating characters. The only one in the book I felt like I knew even slightly when it was done was the narrator and she was lame. Brief episodes of humor were so few and far between that they didn't seem to fit the book at all, but what bothered me the most were the occasional anachromisms that took me right out of the story. For instance, one character was referred to, in 1986, as a Julia Roberts type. No one but Eric Roberts had heard of Julia in '86. Then there was the Rush Limbaugh joke in 1987. The EIB hit the national airwaves in 88. Worst of all was the X-Files joke in 1991.
Everybody knows that the X-files first aired September 10, 1993.
Did I mention that I'm the Queen of the Geeks?
Anyway, despite it's many enormous flaws, I did finish it and I enjoyed it. I may read another of her books someday if I don't have anything else to read. After all, I've read a few of Janet E's that weren't all that good, either and don't even get me started on Susan Elizabeth Phillips. She swings wildly between A+ and D. Heck, even Georgette Heyer wrote one bad book. Did you read A Civil Contract? Yawn!
Now, to cleanse my brain and pretend I'm well educated, I'm reading Utopia by Sir Thomas More. I hear it's pretty good.
