Overview
Welcome to Tallulahland. Population: Growing.
Tallulah West thinks she's got everything figured out, from her interrupted career path to the men in her life. (Career path = anything to displease Dad. Nick = trusty best friend. Dad = see career path.) But when her world is turned upside down (again), not everyone acts accordingly and nothing goes as planned.
Once upon a time Tallulah was happy to follow in her father's footsteps. But then her mom died. Now she'd rather toil away for a hack designer than work on her own designs and lay claim to all that comes with being the only daughter of furniture-designing royalty. Which is a shame — because Tallulah has so much talent.
Nick knows the truth — that she's a little too good at making bad decisions — and has no qualms about interfering in her life. But only after she finds the deed to a plot of land in North Carolina, an unexpected final gift from her mother, is she propelled into action. Accompanied by Nick and an excitement she hasn't felt in years, Tallulah heads south. She's following her mother's dream, but somewhere in the underbrush of an undeveloped plot of land, she finds her own.
Lynn Messina lives in New York City and works in magazines.
Synopsis
Welcome to Tallulahland. Population: Growing.
Tallulah West thinks she's got everything figured out, from her interrupted career path to the men in her life. (Career path = anything to displease Dad. Nick = trusty best friend. Dad = see career path.) But when her world is turned upside down (again), not everyone acts accordingly and nothing goes as planned.
Once upon a time Tallulah was happy to follow in her father's footsteps. But then her mom died. Now she'd rather toil away for a hack designer than work on her own designs and lay claim to all that comes with being the only daughter of furniture-designing royalty. Which is a shame — because Tallulah has so much talent.
Nick knows the truth — that she's a little too good at making bad decisions — and has no qualms about interfering in her life. But only after she finds the deed to a plot of land in North Carolina, an unexpected final gift from her mother, is she propelled into action. Accompanied by Nick and an excitement she hasn't felt in years, Tallulah heads south. She's following her mother's dream, but somewhere in the underbrush of an undeveloped plot of land, she finds her own.
Lynn Messina lives in New York City and works in magazines.
Publishers Weekly
Messina's debut, Fashionistas, offered readers a delightful romp through the world of fashion magazines, but her second novel, in which a self-defeating young industrial designer struggles to recover from the death of her mother and find happiness, is more like a shuffle. Tallulah, known as Lou, is the daughter of a famous designer ("every modern art museum in the world has something of his on display"), but rather than employ her own considerable talents at the family firm, she's an office drudge for a second-rate designer of trash cans. This, she reasons, will punish her father for falling in love with another woman so soon after her mother's death ("imagine: Joseph West's daughter working as a gofer for an obsolescence-monger"). When Lou gets fired, her spunky friend Hannah, who's crashing on her couch while plotting her way into a former classmate's movie, is there to cook delicious food and preach optimism and organization. During a cleaning sweep, Lou discovers that her mother has left her land in North Carolina. Now's her chance to make her dreams come true: she sells the land for a pile of money and uses the cash to start her own design business, Tallulahland. Meanwhile, Lou's slowly falling in love with her best friend, Nick, a web developer from a family of diplomats. "As a baby, he suckled on the milk of conciliation and was swaddled in tact," Lou thinks. Such self-consciously clever and distancing language-which Messina uses throughout-detracts from what might otherwise be a sweetly comic story of love and healing. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.