She's a Party Girl, But Not the Way You're Thinking

How do you recreate the magic that inspired you in the first place?Sarah Mason sure doesn't have the answer to that one. She is one of those “good first novel, mediocre sequels” authors for me. She wrote a brilliant first novel, and the sequel was still pretty good (just couldn’t measure up to the first), but by the third, the magic has been drained. And from what I hear, her fourth isn't so hot, either. 

As I’ve said before in my review of Sarah Mason’s other book, Society Girls, Playing James is a great British chick lit book I would definitely recommend to people. The characters were varied, funny, loveable and pretty well developed (it is chick lit after all; I’m not exactly expecting Pulitzer Prize-winning material here). The plot moved along quickly with plenty of hilarious snafus and the ending left me satisfied. In the sequel, the Colshannon sisters were up to their usual adventures, but it just didn’t have the same oomph.

Party Girl does not pick up where Society Girls left off, nor does it have any of the same characters. Instead, it follows Isabel (I kid you not, I had to look up her name. That’s how memorable she is), a party planner in London who is requested to plan an event for a family she spent her childhood with. The estate she spent her summers on now holds bitter memories, all because Simon Monkwell flipped from best friend to bitter enemy in a matter of weeks.

The problem with this novel does not lie with the hijinks or the plot. It lies with the main characters themselves, who are just trite. It’s pretty bad when the only word you can come up with to describe your protagonists is “trite.” Simon is now this businessman with a ruthless reputation, which in the grand tradition of chick lit is revealed to be a façade. I apologize to those of you yelling “spoiler alert” at your computer screens, but if you can’t see it coming, I think you need to read more. He has a hybrid between an icy attitude and cool politeness aimed toward Isabel, yet she’s supposed to be in “like” with him. They’re also supposed to have chemistry, especially once Isabel understands why he acted the way he did, but I just didn’t feel it. The chemistry between them is just not palpable.

 

"Oh, uh, I failed chemistry...."

The lack of chemistry could be attributed to the boring Isabel and Simon. I hate to compare Party Girl to Playing James, but I just can’t help myself. While James Sabine was cynical and uptight, he was the perfect antithesis to Holly Colshannon’s chaotic whirlwind of a life. His wry and dry comments made everything that much funnier (think House, Chandler or Frasier in terms of witty quips). Simon is just boring and Isabel isn’t much more memorable. I take it as a bad omen that I had to look up her name because I couldn’t remember it for the life of me.

It’s left to the crazy relatives to carry the weight and offset Simon and Isabel’s “relationship” by making irrational decisions, creating comedic mishaps and shaking up everything with their eccentric personalities. At one point, there is a tarantula loose in the house, which causes panic and mayhem among the residents. There was a great opportunity for a tension-filled romantic scene between Simon and Isabel, but because they’re boring, nothing happens. Go figure. If it weren’t for the stereotypical, yet still enjoyable, crazy family members and coworkers, this book would have fallen on its face faster than a drunk giraffe on roller skates.

It is important to remember that this is a fluff novel. It doesn’t need the substance other novels need, as long as it makes the reader happy and leaves them feeling warm and squishy inside. Party Girl did not leave me feeling happy, just bored.

This brings me to an interesting question: how do you qualify boring? Boring is subjective. What you might qualify as boring (baseball, fishing, most nonfiction, vanilla ice cream) others might qualify as some of their favorite things. In the end, it comes down to what you think is boring. If you can’t handle the craziness of the Colshannon family or don’t like eccentric characters, you might like this novel more than Sarah Mason’s other novels. However, if you can’t stand a single moment of normalcy, I would recommend Sophie Kinsella or Jill Mansell. You can still pick up this book, but be warned that not even the cringe-worthy scenes can make up for the love story that is lacking. 

Wentworth Hall- Not Worth Your Time

As a recent fan of Downton Abbey, I feel the need to transition from the show and genre back to real life (the new season doesn’t start until September). When I came across a Hellogiggles post  that recommended Wentworth Hall by Abby Grahame for fans of Downton Abbey, I was intrigued and I picked it up.

What a mistake.

My first tip off should have been that the blog post author said she had to finish watching Friday Night Lights. I’ve never actually seen more than 3 episodes of Friday Night Lights, but from what I’ve seen, it’s not really my type of show. High school, drama, high school drama, mediocre acting and mediocre writing are all things I try to avoid, especially in my TV shows.

Edit: I apologize for the Friday Night Lights prejudice; The Writer’s Guild of America listed Friday Night Lights in spot 22 on their list of 101 best written TV shows of all time. It is also interesting to note that they placed it above Frasier, Friends, SNL, Modern Family and US Office, which are all shows I count as well written. But hey, to each their own. I may not like high school football drama, but some people do.

Secondly, the writer of the post admits to never having seen an episode of Downton Abbey, but from what she’s “gleaned by looking at cast pictures and glancing through Kate Spencer’s recaps, Downton Abbey features pretty dresses, Maggie Smith wearing big, beautiful hats, and scandal.” Maybe that’s what some fans get out of the show, but there is so much more to the show than that! It’s about intrigue, relationships, family, compromise, justice, tricks to get ahead, and there’s a fair amount of fashion in it, too. I like Downton Abbey for the intrigue, the writing, the characters, the acting etc.

To be fair, Maggie Smith does wear a lot of hats. And the same expression, apparently.

Maggie and Lila Darlington are the daughters of a Lord and Lady Darlington, owners of the crumbling Wentworth Hall in Sussex. Maggie is 18 and recently back from a long excursion in Europe. Lila, 16, is disappointed to find out that her older sister has changed from the wild, high-spirited, energetic girl that used to play and get into all kinds of mischief to a cold and reserved “mature” woman. Luckily for Wentworth Hall, which desperately needs money, recently orphaned twins Teddy and Jessica Fitzhugh are coming to stay with the family until they turn 18 and inherit their father’s self-made fortune. Teddy is to be matched with Maggie, but she does not reciprocate his feelings. However, everyone at Wentworth Hall is hiding secrets, some of which are exposed and satirized in a column in the local newspaper.

The back cover promises secrets and intrigue, but the book only provides the former. The entire book is just lacking. The characters are two-dimensional and not very well developed, even to the point of being stereotypes. Grahame half-heartedly tries to introduce some character development to several of the characters, but the only part that shows is the half-heartedness. Jessica Fitzhugh is portrayed as haughty and just plain mean, but then Grahame tries to pass it off as someone who was set off by the uptight and aristocratic people she met in London and is proud of her father’s self-earned money. With good writing it is possible to pull that off, but Grahame misses and it falls flat. It’s as if she read through the first draft and decided to throw in justification or a backstory to close up a loophole or add complexity to a character, but it just isn’t believable. Someone did not spend enough time paying attention in Creative Writing 202. If she wants to see how a character develops and how haughtiness can be perceived, she should take a look at Jane Austen’s Fitzwilliam Darcy or Emma Woodhouse. 

I need to re-watch this Darcy scene for literary reasons....

Then look at the parents! Lord and Lady Darlington don’t have any personality at all. They don’t even come close to their counter-parts in the satirical column because you can’t satirize a person without any personality at all. Teddy is reduced to a wrench thrown in Maggie’s love life (and isn’t even granted a personality), Lila is the stereotypical younger sister who seems to have a crush on almost any man that crosses her path but is ignored by most adults, and the oldest brother Wes is simply a plot device.

The characters are not only simple, but they are also contradictory. This is even more of a shame since a character that simple wouldn’t be hard to keep consistent. Even appearance, the most basic aspect of a character, isn’t consistent. Maggie is described as having “soft blond hair” on one page and only a few pages later, Abbey Grahame says that “her dark curls fall free.” Personalities, I understand, are harder to get down and keep consistent because humans are complex creatures, but I’m pretty sure you should be able to remember a hair color. Lila is supposed to be quiet, yet everything she does in the book screams the opposite. Maggie herself is riddled with inconsistencies, and not just in hair color. I easily guessed the writer of the column I within a few paragraphs, not because of my sleuthing skills or the clues hidden in the book, but because it was the most obvious. And even when it is revealed who wrote the column, it is inconsistent with that character’s narration of previous chapters. You can’t write what a character is thinking, then contradict it later when they’re being viewed from another point of view! That’s just bad writing.

This book was described as having a Gossip Girl-esque quality to it in the sense that everyone has secrets, drama arises, and someone at the house is anonymously writing a satirical column about the Darlington family and their drama in the Sussex Gazette. The column is supposed to be satirical, but it is outlandishly so and certainly out of taste of 1912. The scandals promised couldn’t hold a candle to those found on Downton Abbey; they are all simplistic and are “fixed” much too easily for real life. Not only that, but like a good murder mystery, there needs to be clues and consistency. When a maid talks about the baby and its mother to Lord Darlington, she asks if he could see the loving way the mother looked at and handled the baby. That would have been fine had there been any evidence for it earlier! In fact, the mother and the child are hardly shown together and in the rare scenes that they are, there is no loving manner to be found, even if you squint.

Yup, that's exactly what people in my high school and college looked like. 

After all the trudging through the beginning and middle, I had hoped the ending would at least by a welcome respite and be somewhat satisfying. How wrong I was. The ending is probably one of the most poorly wrapped up endings possible. All the family’s so-called scandals are revealed at once and only Maggie and Michael’s storyline is hastily wrapped up in, I kid you not, 19 paragraphs. And I’m being generous. No one else gets an ending! You never quite find out what happens to Wentworth Hall or the Fitzhughs, or even more importantly, Nora, Ian, Wes or Lila.

It also seems like the book was hastily researched, if at all. Did servants in a house really address their employers and people of the house so informally? Were pencils so popular and common that a servant would make a grocery list with a pencil and pad of paper? And how much does the author know about fashion? She describes fashion in ways that do not appear authentic, but definitely romanticized. I suppose that is rather nit-picky, like the Jane Austen super-fans who criticized Pride and Prejudice film adaptation for their fashion, historical inaccuracies (like Mr. Bingley knocking on and opening Jane’s bedroom door while she’s sick)or just plain inconsistencies with the book.

But still. If you’re going to write a book, and you want it to be good, you have to do your research. Fact check, fact check, fact check. Why do you think the New Yorker is so reputable? They have tons of great fact checkers. Then there are some basic editing errors that should have been taken care of. I would like to say that it was due to some decoding or downloading issues when I got the e-book, but sadly, I cannot vouch for that. Due to the book’s quality and other errors, I would not put it past the editor to let some basic grammar and punctuation mistakes slip by as well. I’ve read fanfictions that are written better than this book.

Maybe that’s exactly what Abby Grahame was going for when she wrote this. Maybe she didn’t want a great book. It is her first novel, after all. Maybe she wanted a 1910s historical drama that was a mix between Downton Abbey and Gossip Girl. However, the only thing she got from Downton Abbey was the setting and what she got from Gossip Girl was the over-the-top drama and an anonymous gossip writer. If you want to shut off your brain and read a hybrid of Downton Abbey and Gossip Girl despite my scathing (all right, just unfavorable) review, I would ask why you’re even reading in the first place. Just go watch Gossip Girl. There are so many other books that you can benefit from, and they have better writing and better stories. From the books that I have read, I would say Mr. Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal was enjoyable and The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne (creator of Winnie the Pooh, actually) was recommended to me. Looking at some reviews on Amazon.com, I think Kate Morton and Julian Fellowes (writer of Downton Abbey) have some books that are well written and are similar to Downton Abbey. If you really like classic literature, you could always try Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.