I Couldn't Help But Wonder...

Summer and the City
by Candace Bushnell
A Carrie Diaries Novel

Genre; Fiction/Chick-Lit
Publisher; HarperCollins/London/2011
Pages; 409
ISBN; 9780007426935

Plot; Carrie Bradshaw is brand new to New York. Having just left her small town life, Carrie is trying to make it big during her first summer in the golden city.

Carrie is due to start her studies at Brown University in the Fall, so she has just a few short months to make it as a writer. Sink or swim.

With the help of her all-knowing friend Samantha, a fellow small town girl trying to make it with the Upper East Side crew, and her newest friend Miranda, a political activist with a hate for men and the stereotypical roles of women, Carrie tries to decode the workings of New York.

Between the self-worshipping artistic upstarts, the Wall Street and Upper East Side highbrows and the hoi polloi of regular New York, Carrie needs to find her niche.

My Thoughts; As an avid follower of the television series and a fan of the first of this series, The Carrie Diaries (Review), it was almost natural that I would enjoy this book.

Bushnell has again thrown a fantastically entertaining book on the table.

Yes, there were a few things which I was a little dissappointed with, but as a whole I found Summer and the City to be witty, fun, thoughtful and it just makes you feel good.

I really liked seeing the young Samantha and Miranda. It is interesting to see how these characters began and what events shaped them to become the characters they go on to be in the Sex and the City series.

I also liked the men in this book. Just as you would imagine, the men take a back seat to the female characters, but they stand alone quite well, particularly Ryan and Capote who are two of Carrie's study buddies. I really enjoyed looking at these male characters through the, often misguided, eyes of Carrie, Miranda and Samantha.

What didn't I like about this book? Well, there is one main thing for me and that is consistency.

Let's face it, the person most likely to pick this book up at the book store is your Sex and the City fan. Especially those die-hard fans who read anything related to the series (like me!), and we expect consistency.

That is the one aspect which lets this book down. If you ask any heavy Sex and the City fan how the girls all met, we could tell you exactly how they became friends. Unfortunately, I think Candace Bushnell might have missed that bit, because she has them all hooking up in completely different ways.

Yes, I know that technically the books and the television series and the movies are different, and there will always be inconsistencies between the two. But you don't watch the Harry Potter movies expecting Harry to have received his lightning shaped scar from accientally walking into a pole.... There are some things which should just be the same.

Otherwise I do highly recommend this book as a fun, light-hearted read.

I particularly recommend this book to young women, because I find the female characters to be wonderful examples from whom to take inspiration. They are strong, they know what they want, they persue their dreams and they arent affraid to be themselves.

Happy Reading!