Rating: 
Summary: Great author, great writing style but ...
Review: this book was a little anti-climactic in the end. Still reading Elinor Lipman is a real treat! her conversations and characters are great and so real - the lines from the men in this book and "The Ladies Man" are ones I can actually see coming out of the mouths of some men I have met. Even if this particular book didn't hook you, read another one or two and you will fall in love with Elinor Lipman's writing!
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Summary: this is not typical in the "chick lit" genre!
Review: This is a must for those who can appreciate intelligent characters and plot schemes. We meet Alice Thrift, who is an intern at a hospital in Boston. She eventually wants to work with the underpriviledged doing surgery on those in 3rd world nations, correcting birth defects, burns, and such. She is not like any character I have read about in the chick lit genre. She is very intelligent, but has a low emotional IQ. She can be funny without knowing it and her mother thinks that she has Aspergers Syndrome (a mild form of autism) because she is not very social and doesn't make eye contact very often. She meets Ray Russo, a character who is talked out of Rhinoplasty, by accident. It's not that she didn't think he should have the surgery, it is because she was anti-plastic surgery.. she was waiting to perform surgeries for more noble purposes. He seems taken with her and asks her out. She accepts, but probably doesn't know why. He is not good looking, but he is big on flattery and can be charming. He also has some habits such as calling her "doc" every chance he gets, and constantly bringing up the fact that she is a doctor in mixed company. You would think that he is very proud of that fact. Their strange courtship aside, Alice comes in contact with other interesting people: her roommate Leo and his midwife girlfriend Meredith, her new neighbor Sylvie, who's "hair was spiky, the ends the color of Cheddar Cheese and the roots dark in a fashion I knew was deliberate." She is also an intern at the same hospital, strangely enough, and they become fast friends. Her only friend besides, Leo, in fact. Sylvie helps her through her strange relationship with Ray, the problems that come about later. The main point is: Ray: is he to be trusted? Can anyone really trust a fudge salesman? Only you can ever know for sure by reading this book, but he has some sketchy habits that would make a normal person doubt him. Is Alice a normal person? Not exactly. Therefore, she is the perfect candidate for the Ray Russo relationship. Craziness ensues! The characters are real as if Elinor Lipman (the author) went through this experience herself. Highly enjoyable.
Rating: 
Summary: A real original!
Review: This is my first Elinor Lippman novel. I perused it while waiting in line to buy Harry Potter and ended up buying it as well. It's fun, intelligent, and most of all, real. I'll try to explain. This story is a cut above the usual "chick lit" novels because the author makes such interesting choices for her characters, the setting, the plot, the tone, everything! Alice Thrift is like no other heroine and the author's technique in portraying her is one of the finest examples of the craft of showing without telling. Alice scores quite low on the emotional intelligence scale. She's lonely, isolated from herself and others, a veritable automaton. She does, however, nurse a secret crush on her roommate, a guy who everybody loves (and who loves everyone else at least for one night). This is never blatantly stated, you really have to know how to read and pick up on the clues. How refreshing! At the same time, Alice is wry and incredibly honest, ill-equipped to deal with others who are not as forthcoming and above-board. However, never fear, she is not a wilting lily needing rescue from a white knight. OH no. After bull-headedly careening into a relationship with a cad, she figures out how to make him show his true colors by the end of the story in a very satisfactory way. The details of her residency, a run-in with a prima-donna surgeon, smack of realism. You can practically smell the betadine. Unlike most fictional doctors, Alice realistically suffers from sleep deprivation and makes a mistake that isn't too bad but her overweaning desire for perfection makes it seem horrendous. I can't think of another novel that gets across the humiliation of making an unprofessional mistake so accurately. The cad, Ray Russo, reminds me of several guys that almost made it past the first date with me and went on to wreak havoc in the lives of my friends. Guys with a certain amount of charm that can't disguise the icky energy they exude. It doesn't take a bloodhound to smell the lies, but it does take some experience, something that poor Alice Thrift just doesn't have. Add to that a large dose of loneliness and it completely makes sense that Alice would get mixed up with a guy who *says* all the right things (he really does) while somehow his actions never add up. How many times have you asked your girlfriends which they believe, words or actions? Ms. Lipman portrays this dilemna with surety and finesse. She never gets heavy handed and injects a lot of fun with the quirky supporting characters such as Alice's iconoclastic neighbor. All in all, this is a fine, funny story of contemporary people dealing with human issues as old as humanity by an author who really knows her craft. She manages to take these themes of love, friendship and career to new and underused areas. I look forward to reading the rest of her novels.
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Summary: Alice through the looking glass
Review: This is the first book I've read by Lipman, but I'll certainly read more after this. Poor Alice, she lacks social skills, confidence, tact and sleep. Educated in academics, but devoid of any female intuition, she follows the path of least resistance and enters into a relationship with the crass Ray Russo. Uncouth, a pathelogical liar and cheapskate, he is the type of character that you love to despise. Lipman's skill in the slow thaw of Alice's resistance to Ray, her development of social skills and her awakening of her potential as a physician and woman is what makes the character of Alice so believable. It is an enjoyable read, with enough depth to satisfy a discerning audience.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining but no payoff at the end
Review: This was a thoroughly enjoyable read until the very end; I kept expecting to get something more --to find out what the future husband is up to or at least more insight into him and his motives. unfortunately the answer seems to be very two-dimensional and rushed compared to the care put in to the rest of the story. btw if they ever make this into a movie, i can see sandra bullock playing the klutzy female lead.
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Summary: Cute and lighthearted
Review: This was my first Elinor Lipman book. It was cute and lighthearted. The central character, Alice Thrift, has a dry humor that I enjoyed. Yet it doesn't pull you in. I felt like an observer. The characters aren't 3-dimensional enough to bond with. However, that shouldn't stop you from reading it. It's entertaining and was an enjoyable read.
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Summary: Light, Bright and Funny
Review: This was my second Elinor Lipman novel (Dearly Departed was my first). Her prose is witty and effortless. Her humor is unforced but ever present. An absolutely delightful, light yet literate read.
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Summary: Alice, me and an airplane ride from Boston to Kansas City...
Review: What a great afternoon I had - stuck on the runway at Logan Airport, then stuck at the gate during my connect in Milwaukee. Thanks to Elinor Lipman's most recent novel, it was all good. There are so many great things about The Pursuit of Alice Thrift, including Lipman's trademark snappy dialogue and sharp first-person perspective. And when Alice begins to transform, the story really begins to fly (even when my planes were earthbound). One tiny shortcoming: It all seems to wrap up a bit too rapidly in those final 20 pages. But by that point, I was sorry to leave the story, so maybe the rapid-fire conclusion was tainted by my own regrets. Elinor Lipman is one of my very favorites, and Alice Thrift is now one of my very favorite Lipman creations.
Rating:
Summary: Depressing and amusing simultaneously
Review: You pretty much know at the beginning how the story will end. The book is more about how the characters got there.
Alice is very literal and technically smart, but she's also naive and tends to take an anthropological approach to people. She's capable of developing a few social skills, but she never really had an incentive to try to before her career was threatened. She's not that much different at the end of the book, but the small gain in social skills and her attempts to reach out eventually move her from complete-outcast to nice-but-kooky.
Ray's a bit of a Rorschach test. My boyfriend's cynical and discrete, and he found Ray horribly obnoxious in the beginning. I'm naive and indiscrete, and while I found Ray to be a bit obnoxious in the beginning, I could see how Alice eventually ended up walking down the aisle with him. The main scuzz signals pre-marriage are that he only carried around $50 bills at first and an attitude/emotions that seems a bit weird when compared to the story he's telling. But he buys her things she needs, brings food to her, helps her make friends, and is generally very nice to her.
Since it's from Alice's perspective, you don't always get all the facts, because only Alice's observations and what she finds interesting are passed along. Since you're stuck in her head and she has no self-esteem at first, the book's depressing and amusing at the same time. Although a number of events occur in the book, the drama's fairly low key (what do you expect from Alice?), so there's a sense of not much happening sometimes. I thought the second half moved a lot faster and was more interesting and funnier than the first half.
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