Blind Submission - Debra Ginsberg
I'm a sucker for books about books. I found Blind Submission on the library's rotating shelf, checked it out, and then just left it for a while because I had a lot of other things to read at the time. Robyn eventually read it and said she thought it was pretty good, so I hung onto it. I finally decided to try it, and liked it enough to finish it off (in between chapters of another book I'm also reading).
It's a literary thriller which owes a lot to The Devil Wears Prada: Angel (who hates her name) gets a job at the Lucy Fiamma Literary Agency. Lucy, of course, is the boss from hell, making absurd demands, criticizing Angel for following orders that Lucy herself gave her. But she's also huge in the publishing world, and Alice finds that despite not getting any sleep and having no life outside of work, she loves her job. She loves the challenge, and is excited to discover that she has a knack for working with writers to polish their work.
Soon, though, she gets an odd bit of manuscript from an anonymous writer: Blind Submission. The story takes place at a literary agency, and the main character shares a lot of similarities to Angel. As she receives more chapters of the book via email, the plot starts to mirror her own life more and more.
The book is a thriller, although it's not really a crime drama so much as a psychological game. Who is the anonymous author, and how does he or she get information about Angel? Meanwhile, we can watch as Angel slowly falls apart, pressured by her insane boss, lack of sleep, and the stress from having her life spelled out for her.
It was more fun than I expected, although I did find a few plot holes that bothered me, and I found the agent-assistant dynamic to be a little over-the-top. I really wanted Angel to find her spine, though that wouldn't have made for much of a story. One of the funniest things was an excerpt from a writer's submitted manuscript which was absolutely horrid. There were more samples at the beginning, and I think the book could have done with a few more, but once we started following a few of the better manuscripts, the rejects went unmentioned.
Not bad, though not at the top of my list, either.
Fed to jonathan's brain | October 07, 2009
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