Puss Reboots: Blog: July 2008: LoveHampton

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Havana Letter by William Cullen Bryant
If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
LoveHampton by Sherri Rifkin
Marlin off the Morro by Ernest Hemingway
The Minister's Wooing by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
My Pet Virus by Shawn Decker
Nana Volume 1 by Ai Yazawa
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Singing to Cuba (excerpt) by Margarita Engle
Spiders and Scorpions: A Look Inside Series by P. D. Hillyard
Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself by Alan Alda
Unholy Domain by Dan Ronco
Virus Games by G. L. Sheerin
Zen of Fish by Trevor Corson

Miscellaneous:
Good Thing We Didn't Have Any Plans

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LoveHampton: 07/09/08

Tori Miller's in a funk. She's lost her job and been dumped by her boyfriend. After a lengthy hiatus, her friends convince her to take a well needed vacation by sharing a house in the Hamptons for the summer weekends. To get her ready it, she is giving a makeover (which happens to be for a pilot of an upcoming reality show).

I have to admit that the set up to LoveHampton by Sherri Rifkin sounded hokey to me and if you stop long enough to think about the backstory, it does have a few holes, but what happens during "Millers" summer is entertaining enough to make the set up irrelevant.

Miller describes her weeks at the house through a series of unwritten house rules. Then Miller narrates her chapter as an illustration of how that rule either works or doesn't.

The plot follows a fairly standard screwball comedy structure where Miller goes from being the oddball, to the rising "It" girl, to almost loosing it all and finally coming to a happy compromise between the highest and lowest points. The book reminds me of Last Chance Saloon by Marian Keyes and Ralph's Party by Lisa Jewell.