Published by Hyperion Books.
"Sex and the City: The College Years"
Chloe Carrington is a junior at Yale, where she writes a column for the student newspaper called "Sex and the (Elm) City". She has some main friends--the slutty one, the prudish one, the intellectual one, and of course, the one gay male--as well as some that come into play whenever their presence is convenient to the plot. The novel is arranged episodically, each chapter having little to do with preceding or following chapters, and each chapter finishes with a column inspired by the events that transpired in the chapter. The one running plot is uninteresting and predictable: Chloe receives a series of online comments on her column (and later, emails) from a mysterious admirer who is, of course, the boy she knows from high school who's always been in love with her and whom she's never been able to consider seriously. (If this wasn't already spoiled by the obviousness of it all, I might have said "spoiler alert" above.)
The chapters proceed with little sense of the time that's past, though at the beginning it's September and at the end it's the following summer. In each chapter, Chloe does something--goes to a football game, plays poker, goes to a naked party, discovers her old boyfriend is now engaged, whatever. If I didn't know better, I'd think I was watching television but again (as I've stated in a previous review), on television I have actors to express character and emotion, whereas Krinsky leaves that kind of trivial thing up to the reader to superimpose on the bare bones stereotypes she's provided. Chloe is, of course, an average of all of the caricatures that surround her, with the added average traits as, of course, a penchant for shoes and the tendency to express how average she is at any opportunity.
Where Krinsky gets points, however, is where she unapologetically makes literary references without explaining the exact origin, the significance, etc., allowing me to believe that she assumes not everyone reading the book is an idiot. I would expect these references, given that the book takes place at a college, and that Chloe has survived at least two years at Yale, and I am not disappointed. Still, that only upgrades the book from "Sex and the City: The College Years" to "Sex and the City With Characters Who Read".
