Brooklyn Girls

May 13, 2013
Burgess (A Girl Like You) delves into the mind of 22-year-old Pia Keller, a spoiled party girl and recent Brown grad who’s just moved to Brooklyn with four girlfriends. After photos of Pia dancing topless show up online, Pia not only loses her job but also her allowance. Following a failed waitressing stint, Pia unwittingly borrows cash from a loan shark to start her own food truck. As the business gains popularity, Pia begins to establish herself as an adult lest her peripatetic parents make good on their threat to whisk her away to their home in Zurich. Meanwhile there are coincidental meet-cutes with a hottie named Aidan; angst over breaking up with the only boy she’s ever loved; clashes with food-truck rivals; girl drama with roomies; and the loan shark’s bullying. This novel’s strength lies in its well-rendered characters. While Pia isn’t very likable as she romps noisily about, using boys and endangering girls, her actions are true to who she is. Her friends also escape the cookie cutter. Good thing, since the narrative is derivative of Lena Dunham’s Girls and doesn’t shy away from highly unlikely outcomes and twists that you can see coming. Agent: Jill Grinberg, Jill Grinberg Literary Management.

July 1, 2013
The first in a new series that will follow five twentysomething women who share a Brooklyn brownstone centers on Pia, a chic, spoiled European expat whose parents have issued an ultimatum that she must find a job or move back to Switzerland. After failing at jobs in an office and a restaurant, she impulsively buys an old food truck and starts her own business, Skinnywheels, serving healthy meals to Manhattan office workers. Skinnywheels is improbably successful, which is fortunate since she owes a large sum of money to a menacing loan shark. British transplant Burgess seems inspired by such popular television shows as Girls and Two Broke Girls, which also follow young women making their way in Brooklyn. Replete with raunchy dialogue, drunken partying, and a mania for fashion, this book is at once derivative and entertaining. The scenes with all the girls gossiping and bickering work best, which bodes well for their continuing adventures in future installments.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)