Rating: 
Summary: Wept with Laughter
Review: No one will be allowed to leave the book during the harrowing laser surgery sequence. Have never laughed so hard in my life.
Rating: 
Summary: Bizarre. But NEVER boring.
Review: Sandra is ALL over the map here with topics for discussion, and they're all funny. Here's a book you can open at just about any page and find something to make you laugh. You can read A YEAR IN VAN NUYS again and again. And it's so REAL! Laugh-out-loud funny. I liked her parody of "A Year in Provence" -- very clever. I'd like to point that you don't have to live in Southern California to get the humor. My favorite part: Her annotated illustrations, like the maps of the brain.
Rating: 
Summary: A Strong, Confident Comic Voice
Review: Sandra may describe herself as a loser and the pathetic eye-bags queen of the world, but she has a strong, confident comic voice. Her blistering wit, her love of hyperbole, her close observation, her fearlessness, and the way she sees through everything remind me of Tom Wolfe--if Wolfe were a young-ish, ethnically-diverse woman writer living in an unfashionable L.A. suburb. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: A Year in Van Nuys
Review: Sandra Tsing Loh is one of the funniest writers in the U.S. and this book is a must-read. She is devastatingly dead-on in her critiques of L.A.-area "society," which, even to someone like me who has never visited the area, means I never HAVE to, because I couldn't know it any better than through her eyes. Her frustration with, and hilariously expressed anger at, the superficiality of the society that she finds herself in is wonderful to read if you have ever experienced that profound shallowness masquerading as self-importance that she seems to confront in just about everyone she deals with every day. If you're an intelligent person trying to fit into American society, she is your spokesperson. It's so fulfilling to find someone who can articulate her disgust with cultural stupidity in such a hilarious way. It just makes you feel good. She is a national treasure.
Rating:
Summary: Mostly Great
Review: Sandra Tsing Loh's latest book reads more like a series of her hilarious essays cloaked in the guise of a novel. The novel's structure follows the character of "Sandra" through one year of her life as she struggles with writers block, perilously careens towards 36, and lives in of all places-horrors!-Van Nuys California. All of this is done with her bone dry humor in rare form, especially in the earlier half of the novel when she's expounding on the Zone diet, and Bally's Total Fitness. I loved the first two thirds, then felt it petered out a little by the end. Living in Los Angeles I found alot of the book really funny, although I don't know how people outside the city would relate. However most people in their mid thirties will find her characters plight at "what am I doing with my life" syndrome very real, funny, and a little bit scary. If you're a fan of David Sedaris, N.P.R., or just like to feel like you're hip and in the know, you'd probably enjoy this.
Rating:
Summary: Sandra's Really Having A Bad Day......................
Review: Sandra's really having a Bad Day, in fact, she's having a Bad Year! Sandra's just turned 36 years old, has eye bags, and is no longer Young, Hip, and Fresh. If she feels this bad at 36, I wonder what's she going to be like if she makes it to 46 years old. Sandra's a writer trying to write that great American novel, but she's got writer's block. She also writes for a failing women's website, and has a TV sitcom based on her life that's due out soon but it looks like it's a failure already. She's neurotic, a mess and quickly becoming a non-achiever. She hopes to make "Haggard" an admired term of endearment in LA.Well, reading this book is like an adrenaline rush. Most of this book was very entertaining. There were some very funny chapters I could easily relate to. Sandra has a lot to say, and where she gets all this information & ideas from, I don't know. It's amazing! I found myself caught up with her and rushing right along with her to the end of the book. She looks at life in a crazy, and different sort of way. I think Sandra has only begun to express herself, and there's lots more to come in print from her. Let's hope so. She's funny, crazy, and a delight to spend an evening with. Recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Parochial
Review: Saying that it's parochial and esoteric and only giving four stars doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it and that I don't buy every Loh. The ideal reader, however, for whom this would be a five+++
would be a female writer who lives, or has lived, in Los Angeles, watches television, and has read Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence." Not qualifying on any of the above,I missed some of the cultural references and some brilliant satirical points were lost on me. The deficiencies are mine, not Loh's.
It does not have a plot in the usual novelistic sense, except that it describes the events of a year. Some of the essays or anecdotes, such as the account of her relationship with a WEB magazine are linked. Her relationships with her husband and sister form leitmotifs. It is a collection of self-deprecating humorous pieces of the type one reads in in syndicated newspaper columns by such people as David barry or the late Irma Bombeck.
She doesn't succeed in making Van Nuys sound all that bad. I've been there once and thought it was quite nice.
Rating:
Summary: Funny but also kinda sad
Review: This book is funny year-in-the-life look at a struggling 36 year old women writer living in Van Nuys, CA. As a former resident of LA, I found the book both funny and sad. While Sandra's life takes some humerous twists and turns, the main theme of the book is that getting old is hard (no surprise there). Aging is all the more difficult in LA-LA land where appearance is everything and substance counts for next to nothing. Really, a sad commentary on Southern California life.
Rating:
Summary: Solidly Entertaining
Review: This is a good - not great - book that generally entertains, but goes too far in an effort to keep the reader amused and interested. The author writes at a higher intelligence level than your typical best selling author does. The downside is that she knows it, and it effects her work. More importantly, however, is the prevalence of eye bag references that nearly made me throw this book in the trash, something I have never done in my life. Six weeks after having finished the book, I sit here editing this review with one prevailing thought in my head, the less-than-enjoyable eye bag references.
The book is presumably about a year in the life of the author. While I don't know how much resonance there is between her real life and what we read on the pages, you can tell there is some. There are too many passionate outbursts for all of this to be fiction. After all, what writer doesn't reveal some of their soul in the words they create? This is what makes it so real and easy to read. As someone once said somewhere, write what you know. But then, what if you know nothing? I digress.
The author clearly knows more than nothing and for the most part, the contents of what she does know are enjoyable to read. Some of the events in the book are resonant with things I've experienced in my own life, despite the fact that I'm a man. I'll go ahead and say the eye bags are *not* one of those things. Still, the struggle to be an author and her ultimate decision in that endeavor are thoughts close to many I have had before. Her final decision, entirely contrary to the fact she authored a book, is something I've also come to adopt. Maybe it this freedom has led her to this work? Again, I digress.
It's a refreshing book, light yet intelligent to a point. It's a quick and enjoyable read. You could certainly do a lot worse. What's more, it has diagrams for those slow on the uptake. All in all, it's generally entertaining and contains real-life insights that can be applied to life and used to learn a little about yourself. Well worth the time spent reading it.
Rating: 
Summary: If you are a man, don't buy this book
Review: This is a story of a whining, aging neurotic woman. She is in need of a full time therapist and her stories of her fading look is monotonous and unfunny.
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