The Ivy Chronicles by Karen Quinn

I just finished The Ivy Chronicles last night. This adventure through the Upper East Side follows the life changes of a successful women with a successful husband and a high-powered job, who loses all of it and makes a new life for herself and her daughters on the Lower East Side. She manages to carve out a career for herself advising upper-class ("first tier") families on how to win exclusive spots in the top kindergartens in the City.

Since no one has ever provided this service before she's striking out in uncharted territory and making it up as she goes along. Bribery, both to the schools and the children, lies told to improve the parents' chances of approval, and misrepresentation abound in this rarefied world where even four-year olds are expected to have a list of accomplishments in order to be considered for acceptance.

But through all this chaos, and all of her hinky choices Ivy still manages to win our approval. I found myself cheering for her and rooting her on and Karen Quinn wraps it all up very neatly in a satisfying conclusion. I ended up liking this book a lot more than I thought I would, since I'm not a huge fan of ChickLit, but I'll be checking out her other work.

Wish You Were Here by Rita Mae Brown

Mrs. Murphy mystery series

Rita Mae Brown is helped with the writing of the Mrs Murphy series by her cat Sneaky Pie. The expertise of her literary cat comes through in the cat character of Mrs. Murphy, who narrates the mystery stories. Mrs. Murphy (and her dog friend Tucker) come up with clues, but have to go to great lengths to communicate their finds to their owner and main human character Mary (Harry) Haristeen, the Post Mistress. The mystery begins in the PO and grows to include many of the towns people and Harry's friends.

This is a cute little mystery and I'm sure I'll read more from this series.

"And the Winner is..."

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
2008 Results

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

by Garrison Spik
Washington, D.C.

The winner of 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Garrison Spik (pronounced "speak"), a 41-year-old communications director and writer from Washington, D.C. Hailing from Moon Township, Pennsylvania, he has worked in Tokyo, Bucharest, and Nitro, West Virginia, and cites DEVO, Nathaniel Hawthorne, B horror films, and historiography as major life influences.

Garrison Spik is the 26th grand prize winner of the contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982.

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."