Cassandra French's Finishing School for Boys

I love the ending of this book: An insinuation that insanity like that can roam freely, without detection. We all fear there's a Cassie French out there waiting for us--someone who's pure evil yet devoid of any real malice. The absurdity it the only thing that keeps this from being the scariest novel on my shelf.

Cassandra French - Cassie Bear to her mother - works as a counsel in business affairs in a movie studio in LA. Her best friends - Claire and Lexi - often go with her out on the town where they try to find the perfect boy for the evening. Oh, and by the way, Cassie has three young men chained up in her basement while she puts them through her Finishing School to be the perfect men. Written in the form of a journal, Cassie comes across as delightfully amoral and at the same time self-deprecating. She does not at all feel that what she is doing is wrong and, in fact, feels that she is doing the men and the world a huge favor. Of course, when she takes an opportunity and adds a movie star - Jason Kelly - to the School, things become decidedly more complicated. I loved Garcia's Dinosaur Mafia books, and this book is again a great bit of fiction - romantic comedy, maybe? It is hard to decide exactly what genre it fits into. At any rate, I strongly recommend it for anyone who likes a good laugh - it's a riot.

Nearing thirty, Hollywood studio attorney Cassandra French constantly grades herself on six courses: Personality, Looks, Physical health, Mental health, Career, and Relationships. Her scores will vary in the first five courses depending on her situation, but she is a drop out when it comes to relationships as she has found men to be shallow and self indulged when they are sober; when males are drunk they become obnoxiously shallow and self indulged.Tired of dating groping alcoholics, Cassandra has a good time attending a baseball game with Owen until the seventh inning stretch when beer consumption takes effect. Cassandra locks the drunken Owen in what she now calls her kennel. When he becomes an obedient canine, she brings him two companions, Alan and Daniel as students at her finishing school for changing slobbering male dogs into caring gentlemen. Movie star Jason Kelly takes Cassandra out, but she learns he is using her to sue her studio. Irate, Cassandra abducts him, but he is a moron unlike his three litter mates as he kills himself by electrocution. Eric Garcia pays homage to the chick lit and hunk lit tales by skewing the sub-genre with this fabulous satire that stuns readers when they realize that this is not another sensitivity quest. Cassandra is amusing as she seems the prototype keeping up with the chick lit Jones until the audience realizes that her boys waiting for food in her basement kennel are not dogs, but human males. The support cast that include her "boys", her employer, and her two pals especially the yoga queen enable Cassandra to star as the queen of the ironically anti-chick lit romp.Harriet Klausner

You can't argue with the tremendously high concept of this very yarny yarn: sick of guys, Hollywood studio functionary Cassandra French decides to drug and chain three of them in her basement, so that they can be taught how to treat women right.With a plot that good, and with repeatedly dire twists to it that make you fear for surprisingly sympathetic Cassie, let alone the author (one of the "boys" she kidnaps, for example, turns out to be taken away from a pregnant fiance: how do you make that funny? Garcia pulls it off), what we have here is a chick lit winner.Maybe my five star reviews are too soft-hearted, because this book wasn't perfect. There's some of the usual boilerplate: e.g., my upper arms are so ugly, and yet every guy in the book thinks I'm so hot! And the love interest story/Bridget Jones diary excerpts are strictly by-the-numbers. But Garcia gets away with it all because he writes like a pro, the jokes aren't bad, and the story keeps chugging along to a quite satisfying end.

It has not been often, in my life, that I have had to put a book down, to laugh out loud, nor am I in the habit of taking a book with me to the kitchen to make toast, because I could not bear to put it down for 5 minutes.This book, is fun, and not just run of the mill fun, but special fun, with whipped cream on the top. I got it in the mail yesterday, and finished it in one straight read. I bought this book for my son, a diehard Garcia fan of 15, and before he got home to start it, I snagged it. What a great read! Garcia wrote so well from the feminine perspective, capturing all the elements of what truly irritates women about relationships with men, and relating so well snippets of quirkiness peculiar to us girls. Cassandra French, is written with such delicious, self deprecative wit, and she is quick with a snipe about herself as well as others. It is such a clever plot, you cannot resist the urge to get sucked in from the first page. In a week, I will probably read it again. :)