2 years after the release of their first novel, The Nanny Diaries comes a new effort from Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. This time, the spotlight is shone on a self-conscious young woman freshly unemployed from a dead-end job in a non-profit organisation, trying to find a new career in the ruthless environment known as New York City.

Citizen Girl has the makings of chick flick Bridget Jones’ Diary without asmuch of the interpersonal relationships, but with more sex (albeit from a very different perspective). In the same fashion as The Nanny Diaries, most, if not all of the book’s characters are given unimaginative names, set in an environment that, however, eventually turns out to be more real than reality itself.

The heroine, Girl, is unceremoniously fired from a non-profit women’s support organisation and desperately tries to find another job to keep herself in her already mediocre lifestyle and out of the unemployment office.

Enter Guy, suspiciously named as the perfect accompaniment to our leading lady, who eventually takes her in as a strategist (of sorts), where she is to produce a proposal to “leverage” an audience of feminists into using a site run by his company (rather imaginatively named My Company, Inc).

As with most contemporary humour novels, the story puts Girl in a series of inexplicable, outlandish dilemmas, giving us the feeling that it’s not so much that she is incompetent with her job, but that the entire world around her is incompetent at theirs. Without so much as a clue, the young and naïve Girl sets out to accomplish the impossible task of keeping her neck above water when everybody else keeps trying to fill her tub.

The book starts out well intentioned enough, with a comedy routine not unlike Jennifer Aniston running around on the set of Friends for about 2 months. Perhaps 2 months may seem too long for some, as Girl’s little working life seems to drone on, developing way too slowly. There are sagely moments in the book though, as Girl meets and seeks advice from the peers she meets on the way. There’s a little relationship thing going on in there as well, but it merely seeks to ruffle a few feathers, and falls quite inevitably into the predictability trap.

That being said, the book is not altogether a disappointment. As with all good stories, there are notable twists, qualifying this book for “not-worth-skipping-to-the-end” status.

Though the story talks around the topic of feminism, Citizen Girl boldly juggles business sense with morality, making it a good guide for those who are looking at hitting the corporate ladder head-on (preferably with a helmet) and for those who have been through it and understand just how bad it can be.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Citizen Girl is available at Times the Bookshop for $16.80

Image taken from Popcrazy’s Pop Culture Book Club