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Sad Desk Salad (2012)

by Jessica Grose(Favorite Author)

2.98 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0062188348 (ISBN13: 9780062188342)

languge

English

genre

Humor

publisher

William Morrow Paperbacks

review 1: This book is not very good. I found most of it to be draggy and boring and repetitive. The narrator mentions at least a half a dozen times how her mother can't afford to buy her health insurance anymore. Okay lady, got it. In the beginning she calls her salad limp many times, even though she just had it made at the store. If this store makes such bad salads, why do you keep buying them? Can't you make your own bad salad at home? And then she describes several days of working as a blogger recycling new pieces at some snarky website, which sounds like the most awful job ever. Anyway, the main character runs around like a chicken with her head cut off, regrets every decision she ever made, takes Xanax to try and forget her woes, and is very successful because of all of it. Th... moree end.
review 2: This book is a mixed bag. The professional dilemma faced by our heroine Alex is compelling and thought-provoking. It raises good questions about what is or isn't appropriate in journalism in a digital age and about how people treat each other in the media. The book raises differing viewpoints in a natural, organic way that made Alex's choices and thought processes interesting. It was also a compelling look at the pressure many young professionals feel even in the confines of jobs they want and enjoy, particularly in light of today's economic realities. The book fell flat, though, in her romantic relationship. Her boyfriend, Peter, seemed very one-dimensional to me. We don't get a good sense of the two of them together. In fact, in two of their four scenes together, he's yelling at her without explaining precisely why he's angry and hurt. It has to do with her going out with her friends, which, in absence of any other substantive dialogue from Peter, makes him seem controlling and temperamental. He says that her job has "changed" her, but we (the readers) don't really know what that means, because she already had this particular job at the beginning of the book. This all makes it difficult to care about Alex's personal relationship. The ending is also a little rushed. Instead of the emotional payoff of seeing Alex and Peter reconcile or the ultimate fallout of Alex's professional choices, we get an extended epilogue in which everything is now hunky-dory. Very anticlimactic. less

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