Rate this book

Receptionist (2012)

by Janet Groth(Favorite Author)

2.47 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1617071617 (ISBN13: 9781617071614)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

HighBridge Audio

review 1: I really wanted to love this book. A young woman from the midwest heads to NYC and lands a job as a receptionist on the 18th floor of The New Yorker. Great start to a story. She is educated and continues her education as she works for the next 18 years in this position. At first, the book seemed esoteric to me but the author was a newly degreed English major at the time and continued to study literature so I'm sure that she could not help herself to include so many quotations and make literary analogies. The parts of the book that I found the most entertaining and interesting are when Groth writes about those who worked at The New Yorker. Famous editors, illustrators, authors and groupies are discussed and that is what I was hoping to discover in the book. Groth, of course... more, writes about her personal life and since this was the late fifties and through the sixties and seventies when she was young and single there is a lot to mention. Quite frankly, she sounds a bit stuck up and confesses near the end of the book that she did try to dismiss a lot of her midwestern upbringing when she hit NYC. However, she makes up for it a bit in writing about her parents and their lives. I think it would have been interesting for Groth to write about her siblings and how they lived through those interesting decades. I get the feeling that Groth pretty much visited her family during her NYC years very little and instead chose to leave the country for studies and respite. But, reading about the goings-on at The New Yorker, cocktail parties and trips with literary names is my Mad Men dream so I'm generally happy with this book.
review 2: Oof. It's a good thing this one was short, because even though I have rarely ever given up on a book, it was all I could do to get through this slim one. This is just not at ALL what it was made out to be by the blurbs and reviews. "An education at the New Yorker" - except there's hardly anything about her actual work there! About the office or the people or the behind-the-scenes of publishing a major magazine...it's almost all just about her kind of boring life, knocking boots and eating steaks and flitting around thanks to the money and kindness of others. The few parts where she did talk about the actual magazine were interesting...I just wish this book claiming to be about working at the New Yorker was, you know, actually a book about that. less

Download links for: Receptionist

Advertising