The Ivy Chronicles
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
When turbocharged Park Avenue mom Ivy Ames finds that she's been downsized from her platinum-card corporate job and her marriage, she swiftly realizes that she's going to need a whole new way to support herself and her two private-school daughters. So she dreams up a new business, helping upscale New Yorkers get their little darlings into the most exclusive kindergartens in the city. What begins as one woman's bid to earn a living becomes an everywoman's tale of midlife reinvention and unexpected romance, set in a looking-glass world where even tots have résumés.
"If you think you may be a neurotic parent, read this and feel sane." —Allison Pearson, author of I Don't Know How She Does It
"Entertaining . . . Picks up where The Nanny Diaries left off." —The New York Post
"[A] ferociously funny tale." —Us Weekly
"Hilarious." —Child magazine
"Tales of Manhattan?s elite trying to get their tots into private schools is sure to make you smirk condescendingly . . . The Ivy Chronicles delivers." —Boston Herald
"The brilliant, witty, and ultimately soulful heroine is a perfect tour guide who will leave you laughing up your latté..."—Jill Kargman, author of The Right Address and Wolves in Chic Clothing
"With humor and heart, Karen Quinn brilliantly skewers the insanely competitive world of wealth we love to hate. Readers will cheer for Ivy!" —Leslie Schnur, author of The Dog Walker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When 39-year-old Ivy Ames loses her corporate job, her big-shot husband, Cadman, cheats on her and she's too poor for her pampered Upper East Side lifestyle, she finds herself creating a new life for herself and her two young daughters on New York's exponentially less tony Lower East Side. Ivy hammers out a living helping the city's elite nab spots in the most exclusive private kindergartens in town, but first-time author Quinn's book isn't a feel-good tale about realizing money isn't everything. Even as Ivy comes to understand that her former life among the ultra-rich was absurd and shallow at best, she continues to hope that she'll snag a new husband so rich that she'll never have to work again. Quinn's characters are unapologetically shallow, two-dimensional cartoons designed to affably lampoon the silliness of New York's elite, giving readers ample opportunity to snicker at people like a newspaper mogul willing to pay off the FDA to get her demon child into a "baby Ivy" league kindergarten and other wealthy, overly successful parents who use their kids to channel ambition and perpetuate elitism. It's good fun in small doses, but lengthy exposure to the cotton candy plot and caricaturish characters may leave readers with the zombie-like feeling produced by watching too many reality TV makeovers.
