Review: Better than Average, Fun But Not Taxing
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 27, 2013
I hate to damn this book with faint praise, and I really waffled between rating it 3 or 4 stars. It's a fun set-up, and I liked the characters, but it's one of those books where, at the end, you're left scratching your head as to WHY you enjoyed reading it.At the beginning of the book the protagonist is fired from her newspaper job because a co-worker steals her article and accuses her of plagiarism.  The first and only job she applies for after that is to be a phone sex "kitten".  It turns out she's good at it. Meanwhile, at school, she meets and falls for a hunky guy in her history class.One of her regular callers is killed, and she decides to find out who did it.  I think this is where the book starts to come apart.  If she had seemed more of an investigative journalist earlier in the book, her desire to know what happened would be understandable.  If she had been taking a class in investigation for journalists, it might have been easy for her to convince herself that she could use those skills to find the killer.  He's an offensive, unkind man who threatens her, and she doesn't appear to be in any danger of being accused of killing him, so her desire to investigate his murder comes out of left field.One of the things I really did like is her shifting viewpoint of her self-image.  She has just lost a lot of weight and can't seem to get used to the fact that men think she's attractive.  I think this is handled somewhat realistically. Using her alternate/phone persona to push to her be a bit more "out there," is a nice idea.  I enjoyed the first third of the book quite a bit, found the middle amusing, but at the end I realized I hadn't really like it as much as I thought.