Rating: 
Summary: Cool Chix
Review: A good read. The author's subtle sense of humor made the book. Her recounting of her personal life was actually much more interesting than the PI stuff. It was full of cool chix doing their thing in NYC with attitude. I liked that Cassie character.
Rating: 
Summary: CRACKED ME UP
Review: Amy Gray is a great writer, but she excels at comedy. There are so many clever scenes--an arm wrestling scene at the PI office (amid rat traps and wiffle bats) another at an amateur strip party in New York, or at the annual office Halloween party where her co-workers have some unfortunate costumes... The section headings alone are worth the price of admission: Kicking Ass and Taking Names, Requiem for a Smoker, Choking the Chicken, Who's your Daddy? This girl can write funny, which is rare to find. Highly recommended if you have a sense of humor and a curiousity about the world of detectives--especially what they do after hours.
Rating:
Summary: i wish i had written it myself....
Review: Amy Gray is like a younger, female Woody Allen. She really gets it. She's captured that peculiar sorrow of living lonely in New York, with raw laugh-out-loud-funny dialog (much of it of the four letter kind) that had tears running down my face. (I live in a different big city on a western coast but grew up in NYC) I must admit the book flagged bit in the middle as the cases got a bit slow, but Gray's crackling dialogue and lovable/slighty demented characters serve well and deliver a very sweet moment in the end, for the characters and the reader.
Rating: 
Summary: Thank God I'm no longer single!
Review: Amy Gray writes extensively of waking up in her own vomit in Spygirl. When she is not puking on herself or clothes lent to her by her friends, she is helping to disable alarms on fire escape doors so she can leave work for her precious cigarettes. She smokes, she drinks, she wonders about her love life. Alas, she seems to have a hard time landing a man who wants to wake up with the contents of her stomach belched out across his chest during the night, not to mention all the men who just don't want to date compulsive smokers. Oh, and she works as an investigator although we don't get much entertainment value nor insight from this occupation. In short, the book has a good title and a well-designed cover. Inside you will find the story of someone who possesses precious little self-awareness and fails to wrestle with any of the personal issues that become so obvious to a reader. She used to work for a publisher, btw, which is the only reason I can see as to why this made it into print. This is not to say that Amy Gray is a bad person, or anymore flawed than the next. It is only to say that she didn't do much in the way of making me like her, sympathize with her or empathize with her in this book. I could forgive all of this if she had actually entertained me with her story.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad Bad Bad
Review: But it might not do this book justice. This book is an unusual combination of twenty-something coming-of-age and sophisticated variations of the theme of spying. The author ruminates elegantly about the nature of memory, the construction of self, the difference between what is false and what is true, and she draws on sources from literature and popular culture to illustrate her points-from Woody Allen to the X-Files, Nabokov and Dostoyevsky. It's a difficult balance to strike, not doubt, but I have to applaud her ambition. I think this book is way more complex than the descriptions may imply, but for the most part, it succeeds. It may put off people just looking for mind candy, which it's not, although it's still a good yarn.
Rating:
Summary: the cover's not so bad...
Review: But it might not do this book justice. This book is an unusual combination of twenty-something coming-of-age and sophisticated variations of the theme of spying. The author ruminates elegantly about the nature of memory, the construction of self, the difference between what is false and what is true, and she draws on sources from literature and popular culture to illustrate her points-from Woody Allen to the X-Files, Nabokov and Dostoyevsky. It's a difficult balance to strike, not doubt, but I have to applaud her ambition. I think this book is way more complex than the descriptions may imply, but for the most part, it succeeds. It may put off people just looking for mind candy, which it's not, although it's still a good yarn.
Rating:
Summary: An Irreverent and Intriguing Memoir
Review: For the legions of former Nancy Drew devotees comes SPYGIRL, Amy Gray's irreverent and intriguing memoir of her three-year stint as a real-life New York City private eye. Combining tales of the author's trials and tribulations tracking down scam artists with entertaining stories of her dating hijinks, SPYGIRL is both a voyeuristic reading pleasure about life and love in the big city and a primer for aspiring gumshoes.Yearning for adventure and an escape from "corporate hell," Gray abandons her low-paying and demoralizing job as a publishing assistant to pursue her childhood dream of becoming a sleuth. Despite the squalid, rat-infested office conditions and an eccentric cast of mostly male co-workers, Gray is in her element at her new job and she plunges into her investigative work with a Harriet the Spy-like devotion to the truth. But anyone expecting action-packed, suspenseful stories of elaborate subterfuge, tense stakeouts and armed confrontations will come away disappointed. Gray quickly debunks the myth of the glamorous world of the PI as we learn that modern-day private investigators do most of their work armed with nothing more than a computer and multiple databases. Sleuthing seems to be decidedly more mundane than the word connotes, concerned mainly with exposing white-collar criminals and fraudulent companies through background checks, sophisticated computer research and skillful phone interviewing. Indeed, Gray's investigations are largely of the run-of-the-mill variety, such as unraveling a phony investment scam being perpetrated by a prison inmate or following the paper trail of a check kiter who plans elaborate weddings without paying for them. Gray's witty observations, stylish writing and crackling dialogue goes a long way at making what could be rather tedious cases come alive on the page, but the narrative loses steam in places where she spends too much time dwelling on mundane aspects of the job. The real strength of the book lies in her characterizations of the quirky people she encounters both in life and at work --- bizarre colleagues such as Assman, aptly named because of an unfortunately placed cyst, and her short-lived boyfriend Edward, who eats emu and is a fanatical devotee of MTV's The Real World. She is also adept at portraying to great humorous effect the mine-filled terrain of dating and relationships, in the vein of a younger, hipster version of Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw. Like Carrie, the author navigates her tumultuous love life with a blend of keen insight, biting wit and the aid of a few good friends and strong cocktails. But her romantic undoing comes when her maniacal determination to ferret out the truth at all costs seeps from the professional into the personal. It is only when she lets down her guard and allows herself to trust her feelings over facts that she is able to have a chance at real happiness. With its requisite urban twenty-something protagonist searching for love and career satisfaction, SPYGIRL is an entertaining entry in the new breed of reality-based Chick Lit. But its smart, ironic voice and brash, truth-seeking heroine elevate it beyond the genre, and it perfectly succeeds at capturing the loneliness, ennui and optimism of a youthful generation. --- Reviewed by Joni Rendon
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious and Smart
Review: Gray has written a very compelling first time book. I bought it on a monday and it was done by wednesday night. It's funny, exciting, romantic and smart. She has a real way with her characters, especially the Assman(!) Go Spygirrrl!
Rating:
Summary: BADLY WRITTEN & EXECUTED
Review: I am amazed at these great reviews.
This book is boring and poorly written.
Maybe I'm too old (35) and have forgotten what people just out of college think/talk/obsess about... but I don't think so. I enjoyed THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA for what it was -- a FUNNY look at a job in an exotic work environment. My god, and people carp that Lauren Weisberger can't write? Did anyone really READ THIS?
No kidding this girl used to work in publishing... clearly she still has friends who are influential enough to get her a book deal. There is simply no other way this would get past anyone... not even the 22-year-old recent Brown graduates who do nothing but go through the slush piles.
Rating:
Summary: A SUNNY MORNING WELL SPENT
Review: I bought this book for the cover--yummy and pink--and so was the book--like candy--it was sweet and entertaining. Highly recommended if you like Sex and the City-like capers and spy stories. I'd like to see the author do something more with her keen observations of dialogues and people.
|
