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Title: A Danielle Steele romance novel with literary pretensions...
Review: ...that Ms. Packer can't quite live up to. Oh, she writes well (which kept me going the first hundred pages or so), but her main character is such a passive, ambivelent person that it's very hard to care what happens to her. And Kilroy is a real pain in the butt, a completely bogus character. As a lifelong NY cynic myself, I saw nothing in the guy that was in any way authentic. He's a writer's pretentious idea of what a deep, troubled intellectual must be like. I kept waiting for Carrie to slap him and tell him to get over himself, but no such luck. Mike, for all his confinement, is the most active person in the book. Ultimately this is nothing more than a plain, old-fashioned Harlequin-type "women's novel," tarted up as literature. I lost interest half-way through and skimmed the rest, and I'm glad I did.
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