Mercury in Retrograde

Penelope Mercury, an intrepid reporter at the New York Telegraph, has pounded the pavement for five years from city borough to borough, carrying out her boss's eccentric orders to break stories that seem inconsequential to everyone but him. Finally, she is inches away from being promoted to her dream job—covering courtroom drama for the paper—but after one spectacularly disastrous day, she is fired instead. Lena "Lipstick Carcrash" Lippencrass has a pretty fabulous life, even by a socialite's standards, as top editor at the high fashion magazine Y. Long lunches with her girlfriends and afternoons spent shopping at Bergdorf's are all in a day's work. But when her indulgent parents abruptly cut off her cash flow and kick her out of her beloved West Village duplex because she refuses to work for the family business, Lena is forced to confront the reality of what it takes to pay the bills. Dana Gluck, a workaholic lawyer, had been married for two years to a man who was perfect on paper but increasingly critical in reality. She hoped that her dreams of motherhood would be fulfilled soon, which surely would also fix their marriage problems. Instead, her husband leaves her for an exchange student/model who, to make matters worse, promptly gets pregnant. When fate conspires to have these three very different women move into the same SoHo apartment building, they soon discover that having their carefully planned lives fall to pieces might be the best thing that could have ever happened to them. It sounds like a movie pitch: Three smart, opinionated young women live in the same Manhattan building and band together to improve each other's personal and social lives. Mixed in is a heady dose of brand names, celebrity name-dropping, and working-girl dialogue. Written by a gossip columnist, this project sounds like the ultimate in chick-lit. Alas, there's plenty of "chick" but not much "lit." With such larger-than-life characters, one would expect that Marguerite Gavin would have a lot to work with in her narration. While she makes a valiant attempt to inject some sass and attitude into her delivery, ultimately it doesn't redeem an unsatisfying book. Fans of Candace Bushnell may enjoy this—others, beware.