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Publisher:
Avon Trade/HarperCollins |
Release
Date: March 30, 2004 |
ISBN:
0-06-057056-3 |
Awards:
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Format
Reviewed: Trade paperback |
Buy
it at Amazon |
Read
an Excerpt |
Genre:
Fiction/Chick Lit |
Reviewed:
2004 |
Reviewer:
Shannon I. Bigham |
Reviewer
Notes: |
Copyright
MyShelf.com |
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Babe In Toyland
By Eugenie Seifer
Olson
Twenty-five-year-old
Toby Morris is an art school and works at Toyland in New Jersey.
Toyland is a major manufacturer of children’s toys and Toby’s
job is to design the instruction sheets that go into the toy packages.
Toby’s days are filled with quirky coworkers developing toys
that will soon make an appearance in stores. While Toby enjoys some
of the kudos of working for Toyland (free toys and a cool-sounding
job title), she tires of working with moody engineers and scrambling
with coworkers to meet deadlines.
Toby
is bored, and looking for some excitement. She has no man in her
life other than her platonic roommate Michael, who gives music lessons
to children and is a borderline hypochondriac. Basically, Michael
is a wimpy guy, and while Toby likes spending time with him, he
is not the man for her. Toby tunes into the local weather report
on television one day and time stops, figuratively, when she sees
J.P. Cody, a handsome and dashing meteorologist. So begins the plot
of Babe in Toyland.
Toby begins sending
innocuous and flirtatious love poems discussing the weather to J.P.
Cody. Michael thinks that she is crazy, although Toby has the support
of her brash, overweight, partying friend Kerrin, who urges Toby
to continue the one-sided correspondence to J.P. Cody and to discover
if J.P. Cody is interested. As the plot slowly develops, we read
about Kerrin’s antics with her new urologist boyfriend, Len,
and Toby trudges along the daily grind at Toyland. A handful of
other characters enter the picture, but fail to add substance to
the story.
While
Babe in Toyland has colorful characters (some memorably
named “The Third Sex” and “The Head Wound”)
and reading about toys and Toby’s experiences at Toyland were
interesting, as I turned the pages and continued to read, Babe in
Toyland meandered and tended to lack direction.
Though
chick lit books are not typically intended to impart a message to
the reader or lead to profound thinking, Babe in Toyland
could use some oomph in the plot department. It dragged throughout
the middle of the book. A brief plot twist and hasty wrap-up of
Toby’s circumstances at the end of the book may come across
as too pat to satisfy some readers.
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