Cassandra French's Finishing School for Boys

This book totally horrified me as I read it but the more I think back on it, the better it gets. I really loved Eric Garcia's Dinosaur series that I wrote about earlier (Anonymous Rex, Hot and Sweaty Rex, and Casual Rex). I also enjoyed Matchstick Men. Now after I say that I should have know that this book was going to be totally messed up because everything he writes has an element of loony in it. However, it starts out so Bridget Jonesy that I was caught off guard. She seems like the normal, shallow, chick lit heroine who hates her job and anyone who looks thinner than her. But in no time you learn that she has three men chained in her basement, and her mom is cheerfully under house arrest for telemarketing fraud. For a lawyer, she follows a very loose interpretation of the law in this book. Don't ask--you will have to read the book to follow her totally screwed up rationalization about how it is OK to kidnap bad dates and hold them hostage. I certainly can't explain her. Here is the first page for all of you who like a glimpse:

"There was a woman on television the other day who insisted that the best way for us, as humans, to achieve our goals is to grade ourselves, in every aspect of our lives, with stark and unrelenting candor. It's not good enough simply to think about these grades, or to tell them to a friend; according to this woman, who may or may not have been an actual doctor, you've got to write them down at least once a day if you want to make a difference in your life. There's no need, she said, to make any specific proactive plans for these changes to occur. The sheer act of writing them down, is eventually, enough to do the trick. Though I have a strong feeling the woman was a shill for the Bic pen corporation, it's difficult for me to resist what seems like a ridiculously easy method to turn my life toward the better. If all it takes to achieve happiness is a belly flop into the culture of constant self-evaluation, I'm ready to pull on a bikini and call myself a swimmer. To start, I'll give myself a C in metaphor."

I give Eric Garcia a C- for getting inside the mind of a woman (I cannot see most of this behavior as female, but instead an extremely exaggerated version of how men might see women) and an A+ for writing an apparently fluff summer read that completely took me by surprise.