Pug Hill - Alison Pace
by Zia ~ June 12th, 2006. Filed under: Books.
A little while ago, I got an e-mail from Alison Pace announcing the publication of her new book. As she was very nice about removing me from her mailing list and because I thoroughly enjoyed her chicklit novel If Andy Warhol Had a Girlfriend, I went out and got a copy. Oh yeah, and the title, Pug Hill, may have had something to do with it too.
Hope has lots of hang-ups, a secret crush, and a deadly fear of speaking in public. When her parents ask her to speak at their 40th wedding anniversary, she runs out to enroll herself in a public speaking course. Luckily, there’s the one thing that always calms her down: watching all the pugs cavort at, you guessed it, Pug Hill, a little corner of Central Park.
So Hope goes through the public speaking course, watches pugs, makes a whole bunch of self-discoveries, including that she doesn’t really have any romantic interest in the object of her crush, rediscovers that her first real love (first mentioned about three-quarters of the way through the book) is really still her only love, and then meets up with him on the beach at the end. In other words, the plot kind of limps along on a bunch of half-baked premises.
And it’s a shame because Pace really does write well. There is a glimmer of a more serious novel in Pug Hill, but it gets lost in the chick lit formula.