Book Review: Blow Me

By Gail Allison

If you’re a fan of "Sex and the City," you won’t want to miss “Blow Me” by Lennie Ross. This fluffy, fun novel bounces through the lives of three single forty-somethings in L.A. as a nice, easy read. Don’t look to it for deep philosophical meaning though. If you take this one at face value, you’ll have an entertaining read that keeps you engaged pretty much throughout.

Skylar is an executive assistant who is lazy with a capital L. Unfortunately, her boss realizes this too, and keeps her around only long enough to train her replacements, and then she is cut loose. Dawn is a matchmaker at a dating agency who is starting to panic about her own biological clock. She’s trying to stop the clock by freezing her eggs, but at the same time she’s busy looking for a man. Chloe is struggling to make it as an actress, and paying the bills as a realtor. Her biggest dream in life is to marry rich.

After a wild night out, Skylar ends up burning down her apartment (her landlord is Dawn), and instead of being an adult about it and ‘fessing up, she skulks around, choosing to live out of her car (because she’ll NEVER give up her Mercedes), shower at the gym, and nosh on freebies from cafes around the neighborhood. She’s trying every tactic she knows to be noticed by the men around her because…hey! Free dinner! And maybe a relationship on the side?

All Dawn wants is a baby. But when a new relationship starts blossoming, she has no idea if she’s ready to jeopardize it by sharing just a little too much and telling him that she’s in the middle of having her eggs frozen just to delay the inevitable by a few years. Her “should I/shouldn’t I” waffling is a dominant argument in the book.

Chloe is a mess. She makes it painfully obvious that all she wants is to marry rich, but she’s so incredibly indelicate about trying to find someone that I honestly just wanted to flip past those pages. She certainly provides some comic relief, but she’s also quite a grating character.

The theme of female friendship and learning to lean on people is prevalent in this book, and I certainly enjoyed that aspect of it. It was well-written, and the storylines (there were three: one for each girl, and they all intertwined) drew you in and left you wondering what was going to happen next. However, these women are supposed to be in their mid-forties, but they were all acting like spoiled twenty-somethings.

Probably the most unfortunate part of this novel was the naked desperation that these women demonstrated. They all had talent: that much was obvious. But why did they all need to wait for a man to come along and show them the way? It was really frustrating to me to read the whiny diatribes of the characters about how sad it was that they were single and how they’d do anything to get a man, especially when there was so much to be appreciated in each of them. I wish these women were able to get it together without some dude waiting in the wings.

All in all, “Blow Me” was a fun read, and I certainly commend Lennie Ross for taking on the subject of women depending on each other in the big city, especially since Sex and the City set the bar so high. I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoys Candace Bushnell’s writing style, or is just looking for a nice light read. Do take this one with a grain of salt, though, and remember to look yourself in the mirror afterward reading it and repeat, “I don’t need a man to be my best self”.

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