Feb 25 2003
89749238
he was going to show me spring…
was going to. yeah. it always seems to come down to that, doesn’t it?
and that concludes my vague statement of the day.
anyway, i was going to (heh) write a review of the book jemima j by jane green. but i don’t think it’s worth the effort it would take for me to write a thought-out review, so let me just sum it up:
1. jemima is fat and hates herself, but she loves this guy ben.
2. jemima meets guy over internet and her friend manipulates a photograph of her so she’ll look thin, and jemima sends picture. internet guy thinks jemima is hot and wants to meet her.
3. jemima loses about 100 pounds, yet doesn’t buy any new clothes throughout her weight loss. yeah, it’s just not fucking possible to go from a size 22 to a size 8 and still wear the size 22 clothes. jane green, get a clue.
4. jemima (who is from london) flies to los angeles to meet internet guy. he is hot and they have a lot of great sex. but there’s trouble in paradise… something’s wrong with internet boy wonder and he ends up being somewhat of a psycho and jemima ends up on her own.
5. jemima meets up with ben (who has become a big london celebrity) and they have great sex (even greater than the sex she had with internet guy) and realize they are in love. jemima gives ben her phone number but he loses it. when he doesn’t call, jemima gets depressed because she figures that ben hates her, but he’s really distraught.
6. basically, it all ends up working out and they all live happily ever after.
7. this is the last paragraph of the book. can we get a little more ridiculously didactic?
     But fairy tales can come true, and just like Jemima Jones, or Mrs. Ben Williams as she’s known outside of the glossy magazine where she now works, if we trust in ourselves, embrace our faults, and brazen it out with courage, strength, bravery, and truth, fate may smile upon us too.
8. basically, i feel that this book stole $11.95 of my hard-earned cash, along with a few hours of my life. i am bitter about this. yes, i am a snob about the books i read, but i do think that books can be cute and fun and not deep at all and still be good books (i.e. the bridget jones books). this one was trying to be cute and fun, but instead was stale and moralistic and overly predictable. (the back cover of the book said that the story was going to have a surprise ending that nobody would expect. the back cover lied.)
9. though, to be fair, i did feel jemima’s pain over that internet guy thing.
10. so, just in case you were wondering, i think that if you don’t want to feel robbed by a reading experience, you shouldn’t read jemima j.
