Stephanie Lessing: She's Got Issues

Avon (Trade paperback), ISBN 0-06-075696-9

After dreaming about working for Issues magazine forever, Chloe Rose finally gets a job there. But not the job she expected. She applied for an editorial assistant position, but got off the elevator on the wrong floor and ended up as the assistant to the assistant in the promotions department. She fetches coffee, makes photocopies and brainstorms ideas, which her boss, Ruth, promptly passes off as her own. But sweet, clueless Chloe doesn't care. Chloe works hard to help Ruth, even though Ruth seems to hate her for no good reason.

Chloe especially loves the perks of working at a women's magazine -- the shoe closet. She loves spending her lunch breaks in there, and isn't terribly ashamed when Stan finds her talking to all the shoes in there. But the editors on the content side spot the pair exiting the closet, and the catty gossip soon starts. A rather nasty article, painting Chloe as a backstabbing ladder climber sleeping her way to the top, gets pitched for the magazine, but fortunately it never sees print. Chloe merely shrugs it off and tries to get along with everyone, even though she now pretty much hates her job.

Stan turns out to be a bright spot. Chloe finds herself infatuated with him, and they soon start dating. And then she finds out his name isn't Stan -- it's Dan. As in Editor-in-Chief Daniel Princely. The magazine's employee conduct rules also forbid relationships between supervisors and their subordinates, so Dan must figure out a way to both keep and fire Chloe.

She's Got Issues doesn't contribute anything to the chick-lit genre. Chloe doesn't stand out from any of the other shoe-and-fashion-obsessed heroines. Wait, she does stand out, but only because of her utter stupidity. Chloe can't even figure out how to use the subway system. An occasional brain-fart or foible adds character to a heroine, but Chloe's persistent idiocy just grows more annoying. Lauren Weisberger wrote a much better fashion-magazine-hellish-workplace plot in The Devil Wears Prada. And She's Got Issues wraps up way too fast, almost as if Stephanie Lessing noticed an almost empty paper tray on her printer and condensed fifty pages down to three so she could print the manuscript out to mail off to the publisher.

Jen Foote

Jen Foote recently moved to central Florida, where she is a copy editor and page designer at a small daily newspaper. She is ecstatic to live an hour away from the ocean.

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