Monday, July 18, 2016

The Job Blower - Melinda de Ross - a good-natured mockery of chicklit and rom-com

Synopsis:
Camilla Jackson is an ordinary young woman with an extraordinary knack for attracting disaster. When she is fired from her job as a secretary at a law firm, she realizes she has no idea what she wants to do next. Every job she does land ends up tragi-comically. But when she meets the drop-dead-gorgeous journalist, Carter Evans, her life seems to brighten. Until she discovers that he hides some very deep and painful scars. So will Camilla help him heal and, in the process, find her own way?

My thoughts:
I admit to feeling a sense of ethnic solidarity with the author. We're both fully bilingual, bicultural, A-type, sarcastic Eastern European authors who navigate between the first and the second worlds. Which means, one of our guilty politically incorrect pleasures is making fun of neurotic, pea-brained, thin-skinned American women who can start a nuclear war with one snap of fingernail clippers. (I can hear some of you saying "Don't like America? Go home, commie!") Okay, okay, I will go home where I belong in just a minute. As soon as finish writing my review.

A title like The Job Blower is sure to catch your attention. With a ditsy hair-twirling blonde on the cover? You can't go wrong. What makes the narrator/protagonist sympathetic is a certain degree of self-awareness and self-mockery. Even when plunging head first into romantic melodrama and self-pity, she acknowledges how vapid and trivial her problems are. The author mentions being a fan of Sophie Kinsella. Well, you can certainly feel Kinsella's influences in "The Job Blower". If this novel was ever to be turned into a movie, I can imagine Anna Farris playing the lead.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for this too-amusing review of my wannnabe-amusing novel, Marina! :D

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