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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN January 29, 2006 Issue 
Party Girl By Sarah Mason Ballantine Books, 2003 
Visiting London's Fast and Trendy Crowd Sometimes the expectations of the first book review of a New Year are a bit like our expectations of the New Year itself - expectations about new beginnings, about something spectacular and remarkable, about books that reveal unfathomable truths or give us fail-proof tips of how to carry to completion those New Year resolutions, our perpetual New Year nemesis. But that sort of thing is hardly what I, or for that matter probably others as well, want to read after the "Holidays," which seem to have much more in common with a rat race than with a holiday. After a period of excessive stress, I personally like to read something - well, sort of mindless and sort of entertaining. This is what led me to Sarah Mason's "Party Girl" - a book about the young, professional, fast and trendy London crowd. "Party Girl" lets us escape our daily reality by taking us into a world of tony parties, balls, fundraisers and grand openings. And into the tangled love lives of the English upper crust. Isabel is tall, pretty, university educated and worldly. She works as a party planner for one of London's largest and most prestigious firms, Table Manners. It is through the family connections of the employees of the firm that Table Manners procures a great deal of its business. There is nothing ordinary and staid about the firm. The employees are artistic and therefore temperamental and volatile. No matter how hard the Managing Director, who is just as temperamental and idiosyncratic as the rest of them, tries to impose an organizational routine on the firm's employees, when the creative muses visit the party planners, chaos reigns supreme. Isabel, on the rebound from a bad relationship, searches for love in the debris of this psychotic world. And then, her past comes to haunt her. A family, on whose estate Isabel had grown up and with whose children she had romped on the estate's grounds, request her as the planner for a huge fundraiser to take place at the manor. There are all sorts of hints of unsolved mysteries of the past and more eccentric characters - Isabel's parents and flat-mate Dominic, her tweed-clad aunt Winnie, a testy housekeeper, Mr. Monkwell, the patriarch of the manor, his exotic sister and his two sons, Will and Simon. It is Simon that holds the answers to all the mysteries. Many moons ago, Isabel and Simon had been the best of friends. Then something had happened which had changed Simon's attitude towards Isabel. And now, fifteen years later, life brings them together again accidentally. Simon has acquired the reputation of a ruthless businessman in the world of break-ups and takeovers of companies. After many stratagems and subterfuges, we find out all the deep secrets and they are a huge let down. They are hardly anything worth obsessing over. But Isabel saves the Monkwell family from bankruptcy and the misunderstanding between her and Simon finally clears up, paving the way for true love between them. From the very beginning "Party Girl" hooks us with its wittiness. But although it starts out with a bang, it fizzles out towards the middle and becomes totally flat at the very end. By the middle of the book, the plot has deteriorated and the characters have begun to resemble caricatures until eventually the ending slides into anticlimax. The sharp wit that makes us laugh out loud in the beginning becomes a nuisance towards the end. Author Sarah Mason is very popular in England. Her first novel "Playing James" received the Parker Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2003. Her second book, "Society Girls" was received very well by critics and readers alike. This is why the disappointment in "Party Girl" is most surprising. Still, the book is entertaining and the clever bantering between the characters is a welcome change from our daily conversations. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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