Book Review: Sad Desk Salad by Jessica Grose

The Deal: For the last six months, Alex Lyons has been working for Chick Habit - a up and coming blog that covers all sorts of women-related things like celebrities and pop culture - and though at first it seemed like a great opportunity, it's starting to drive her crazy.

She spends her days glued to the computer/iphone, showers only occasionally and has been wearing the same ugly muumuu every day of the summer so far. And she has melt downs each time she gets hate mail. 

Still, she can't seem to tear herself away, and she can help but succumbing to the pressure her boss, Moira, puts on her to keep spewing out content and grow a pair and stop whimpering about said hate mail. 

Things get seriously complicated one week when she stumbles into an irresistible scoop that could very well destroy someone's life.

My Thoughts: I started Sad Desk Salad with high hopes, I was actually talking through a friend while I read the first few chapters and kept quoting stuff at her, because Sad Desk Salad starts in a very funny way that resonated with me - I'm a blogger too, after all - and when she was going nuts about page views and less than nice comments that part rang quite true. 

But as time passed and the scoop bit was revealed, I found myself wishing Alex would grow a pair too. And that she would stop being such a paranoid psycho. She's almost thirty yet she keeps behaving in a very childish way - particularly with her boyfriend Peter and her best friend Jane - and blames everyone but herself for the things that keep happening to her. 

I started the book liking Alex a lot, but by the end I'm not sure I liked her at all. Though the book had it's funny moments it did started to moralize a little toward the end which is just annoying - and there is this sort of mystery thread running through that added to that and was pretty thin. 

Sad Desk Salad comes out October 2nd, 2012.

Favorite Quote: "What I wrote could sometimes be constructed as mean - but I always tried to be fair. "Nice" is different than "good", as Stephen Sondheim says. My new rule turned out to be: Don't write anything you wouldn't say to a person's face. Sober."