It is not often that you will get a hero that is so flawed you wonder if you’ll like her. Case in point: the main character in “Confederacy of Dunces” – I disliked him so much I put the book down after about 100 pages. But the author of this book made the main character just warm enough that even though she seemed very coarse and unrelatable (to me, anyway) I still found myself rooting for her to get a happy ending. This book would make a GREAT independent movie starring someone like Parker Posey or Chloe Sevigny.
Set in the mid-1980s, it’s the story of straight-forward-to-the-point-of-rude Lisa, a second-generation Italian book editor who spurns a job in NYC and moves to Ossining, NY to help run the editorial department at a pharmaceutical company. She meets and begins an affair with an unlikely person: her uptight Jewish boss. Toss in a mother who is desperate to marry her off and Lisa’s gay cousin Dodie, and you have a quirky novel that is quite engaging.
A nice read, if unexpected (it’s not a typical chick lit romance novel AT ALL).
3 stars out of five.