Product Description

New York at night is an urban playground where glamour and danger are just flip sides of the same thrilling coin. The tough, beautiful player at the heart of Jardine Libaire's acclaimed first novel is Lee, the consummate party girl. Lee has the right designer clothes, the right job managing a stylish restaurant, and the right lover, who finances all her bad habits. As the lights go down at closing time, the energy of the city is a call Lee cannot resist, even when her Cinderella-like existence begins to unravel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #941667 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-13
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.25" h x .63" w x 5.50" l, .46 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
They say the best nonfiction reads like fiction. But is the reverse also true? It would seem so after reading this gorgeously written debut novel, whose narrator is so keenly evoked that her reminiscences read like a memoir. Lee is one of New York's party girls extraordinaire. She's also a complete train wreck. She manages a trendy Tribeca restaurant yet can't pay the rent on a railroad flat in Brooklyn's hipster ghetto. Not many salaries could support her ravenous appetite for drugs or her taste for white knee-length furs from Bergdorf's. Still in mourning over her mother's death two years ago, Lee likens herself to a pint of raspberries: "On top the ruby berries looked juicy. Unwrapped and spilled into the colander, they revealed undersides black with rot." In deftly rendered scenes and flashbacks, Libaire introduces us to the eccentrics who occupy Lee's life: Yves, her French sugar daddy; Kelly, an enigmatic wanderer; Belinda, her reformed best friend. She's able to capture a character's essence in a single, lovely phrase, particularly Lee's mother: "Guests would arrive at eight and find her in a damp bikini, only beginning to scour cookbooks for ideas. But the night would be unforgettable." Laced with musings about art and marked by unexpected metaphors ("Drugs turned the cardboard box of an ordinary day into a honeycomb, dripping and blond"), the book summons consistently powerful images. But like a sloppy night of boozing recalled the morning after, some readers will wonder what the point was. More of an extended character study than a plot-focused narrative, it floats along on a cloud of Lee's narcissism, celebrating "poverty and dependence" as glamorous, despite efforts to convince the reader otherwise.
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From Booklist
Soho restaurant manager and bedraggled party girl Lee is beginning to wonder exactly when her joie de vivre morphed into mania. Every night she staggers home in her Helmut Lang heels after drinking and drugging her way through the evening. She has stopped making art; no longer hangs out with her former partner in crime, Belinda; and has been abandoned by her lover, who's off to culinary school in Paris. She's taken up with a much older, wealthy man, although their relationship seems to consist of dining on Kumamoto oysters at every high-end restaurant in town. Then she meets Kelly, a well-traveled ex-surfer who is slowly and painfully trying to put his life back together after losing a good friend to suicide. With his help, Lee starts to think about refashioning her life. First-novelist Libaire jams her paragraphs with fractured images of the cityscape, brand-name clothing, trendy neighborhoods, and after-hours clubs. Some readers will be put off by her distinctive style, but quite a few others will be seduced by her cinematic writing and her vulnerable hipsters. Joanne Wilkinson
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