Sad Desk Salad

It's time for me to write my book review. I should have done this weeks ago, but I was so busy reading and trying to meet my yearly goal! I not only met my goal, I exceeded it. I read a whopping 476 books for the year 2012. Now it's time to clean out the cache in my Amazon account so I can keep count of how many I read for 2013.

LIke I said, I read this book a few weeks ago. I was really excited about the prospect of reviewing a book online. When I came across the well-read wife blog, I was thrilled to find out I had been chosen as part as her book club. She chose 20 people and sent us each a copy of the book. The anticipation of the book arriving in my mailbox was a little on the crazy side. Finally, my book arrived and reality set in. I am not a great writer. My sentences are sometimes fragments, sometimes run-ons. I rarely make a point because my mind is constantly going and half the time I forget the point I am trying to make and just ramble on and on. So, I was afraid to read the book, because that meant I would have to write the review. I finally read it, mainly because curiosity outweighed my fear. Now I have thought of what I could write for two weeks that would make me sound smart and witty - I got nothing! I woke up this morning and decided I would just write what I write. This is just a warning that it may not make sense to you, the punctuation will be bad, and the content will most likely be dreadful. I am not a professional writer. I should be a professional reader, because I am super addicted. The only way for me to do this review is to write as if I was talking to a friend about the book...so, hear goes!

Sad Desk Salad by Jessica Grose

It was a little hard to get in to. In fact, it took me nearly 50 pages to actually become interested. The book is set over a one week span of time in which Alex Lyons (the main character) battles her job, friends, boyfriend, herself, and a psycho blogger determined to bring down Chick Habit (the celebrity website Alex works for), but more specifically, Alex.
It was really hard to relate to Alex. She is a 25 year old with writing ambitions of granduer. She takes a job writing for Chick Habit, a celebrity gossip site, because she figures that writing is writing. The problem is that it is basically sucking the life out of her. I understand the ambitious 25 year old, but her neuroses is off the chart. Half the time I thought she was going to have a mental break at any moment. Alex works from home, she rarely showers, she wears the same outfit over and over - and it's a muumuu...not even an attractive outfit, she works non-stop...it's honestly a little horrifying. She has a live in boyfriend, Peter, and all I could think was why he was still with her. She treats him like crap, she smells, sleeps in sandy clothes, works constantly, she whines. Yuck! After reading through most of the book I reminded myself that it takes place over the course of one week. Alex is actually a very typical girl. It's hard to believe that the shenanigans she got herself into happened over the course of one week. She's just young...in some aspects she seems more like 20 than 25, but she's just a girl trying so hard to please her mom and not really knowing what she wants for herself. It's one of those things where you tell yourself you want to be a doctor for so long you dont have a clue what else you could possibly do. In her case it's a writer.
When a tip comes in with a video of a half-naked daughter of a politician doing drugs in her Ivy league dorm room, Alex faces some hard choices. 1) Post the video, and secure her place at her job, but most likely ruin someone's life. Or 2) Ignore the tip, and possibly lose her job - which to Alex equates to basically losing her life and disappointing her mother. Her choice causes an implosion of her life, including the start up of a hate blog BTCH (Breaking the Chick Habit) which starts sending Alex threats. Luckily, she has that one person that we all need, Jane, her very best friend. The type of friend that calls you on your crap, encourages you, pushes you, and loves you unconditionally.
While trying to comes to terms with her decisions, Peter, her boyfriend of 3 years leaves her, Jane lays it all on the line in terms that Alex might actually understand, and her mom gives her the kind of advice a lot of moms do...the whole, "Only you know what's right for you." Grrr. Alex sets out to right some wrongs. She has to find the person responsible for BTCH, find the politician's daughter who is suddenly missing, figure out what to do about Peter, and decide what she really wants from life and the kind of person she wants to be.

All in all, it was a pretty good book. I would give it 3 stars. There were some really slow parts, I felt like there were way to many mentionings of pop culture - one or two...even 5 is okay, but this book was boombarded with it. It was a fun, fast paced read, but I am not a big fan of books where I spend the majority of the book being mad at the protagonist. It's a little annoying at times, but it was still entertaining, and I read it in one sitting, so it couldn't have been too bad!

Check out Mandy's Blogger Book Club #MBBCWRW for discussions and the reviews of the other 19 people, you can go get the book and join in the fun!