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Overview
Lisa Diodetto's mother may be ready for her to get married but Lisa isn't.
At her sister's wedding she ducks when the bridal bouquet comes floating her way, and the only "eligible bachelor" in Lisa's life is her beloved gay cousin, Dodie.
Ditching her life as an underpaid, oversexed publishing drone in Manhattan, Lisa takes a lucrative spot at a more conservative company, and begins writing—on company time—a novel that pokes fun at corporate life.
Enter Lisa's main character: her new boss, Eben Strauss. A man of manners and caution, Strauss manages to bring out the best bad girl in Lisa. And before they know it, two very different people from two very different worlds are doing the one thing you should never do at the office: falling in love.
In her funny, familiar, heartbreaking new novel, the award-winning author of Blue Italian weaves a tale of family, work, sex, and love—and of all the things we try to leave behind but never really can. . . .
Synopsis
Lisa Diodetto's mother may be ready for her to get married but Lisa isn't.
At her sister's wedding she ducks when the bridal bouquet comes floating her way, and the only "eligible bachelor" in Lisa's life is her beloved gay cousin, Dodie.
Ditching her life as an underpaid, oversexed publishing drone in Manhattan, Lisa takes a lucrative spot at a more conservative company, and begins writing—on company time—a novel that pokes fun at corporate life.
Enter Lisa's main character: her new boss, Eben Strauss. A man of manners and caution, Strauss manages to bring out the best bad girl in Lisa. And before they know it, two very different people from two very different worlds are doing the one thing you should never do at the office: falling in love.
In her funny, familiar, heartbreaking new novel, the award-winning author of Blue Italian weaves a tale of family, work, sex, and love—and of all the things we try to leave behind but never really can. . . .
Publishers Weekly
A young woman's intraoffice, interfaith love affair collides with her devotion to her Italian-American family in another wise-cracking, romantic novel from Flannery O'Connor Award-winner Ciresi. As in her Blue Italian, the protagonists in a problematical romance are an Italian woman and a Jewish man. Second-generation Sicilian Lisa Diodetto has just turned a mouthy 25 and shucked her job in New York and her rat-infested apartment in Brooklyn to take the improbable position of assistant manager in the editorial division of Boorman Pharmaceuticals, in Ossining, N.Y. There, she promptly falls in love with her available, rather uptight boss, Eben Strauss, who turns out to be the descendant of Holocaust survivors whose stories are in a collection of interviews Lisa has edited. Meanwhile, Lisa is working on her own work, Stop It Some More, a graphic corporate novel. The "excerpt" from the interviews offers a snippet of Ciresi's writing at its finest--thoughtful and lyrical. The novel, Lisa admits, is often "artificially witty," and, alas, Ciresi's believable but uneven romance too often merits this same description. The chain-of-command and divergent background problems of Lisa and Eben ring true and cliche-free. What drives the big wedge between them is a crisis involving Lisa's beloved gay cousin, Dodie, that reminds the reader how long ago the book's time frame--1985--really is.