Product Description

Meredith Moore is the perfect continuity girl. An on-set script supervisor, she is the error catcher, the one who makes sure every take matches seamlessly with the one that came before it. But when Meredith wakes up on her 35th birthday with a sudden acute yearning for a baby, her personal sense of continuity is thrown into flux. Determined not to marry, she impulsively flees humdrum Canada and heads to London to reunite with her notoriously eccentric mother, Irma, and accept a job on a famous producer's film. Her covert plan: find a man with good genes, seduce him, and have a child--all without him knowing, of course. But in her quest to become pregnant on her own terms, she will accidentally discover a web of secrets that will change the way she envisions both her professional life and the nature of love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1458016 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Canadian journalist McLaren's debut novel is the witty, down-to-earth story of Meredith Moore, a tinseltown toiler whose personal life is anything but perfect. In charge of making sure the placement and number of everything from cigarettes to ice cubes is continuous from scene to scene, Meredith's professional eye for perfection doesn't extend to her personal life. At 35, she is a self-proclaimed disaster area. After a visit to gynecologist Dr. Joe Veil, Meredith decides her biological clock has ticked long enough. After walking off the set of her latest film, Meredith yields to her eccentric poetess mother's pleas and returns to her native London. Joined by her best friend, Mish, Meredith starts work on a new film and sets out to satisfy her maternal pangs by finding a man to father her child. Meredith encounters an alcoholic falconer, a sadistic artist and a mysterious millionaire director as she tries to balance her desire for a child with her yearning for real romance. Despite a potentially clichéd plot, McLaren's writing is crisp and her characters are surprisingly fresh, resulting in a novel that celebrates breaking away from the expected.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Meredith Moore has always prided herself on her eye for detail. As a continuity supervisor, it's her job to make sure every little detail in each scene of a movie is consistent, down to how much wine is in a character's glass. When a director accuses her of purposefully botching a scene, Meredith storms off the set. The incident coincides with a personal blow: Meredith pays a visit to the gynecologist and learns that at 35, her time to conceive a child is running out. A solution for both pops up when Meredith is offered a job on a film shoot in London. She decides to take the job and find a man to father a baby, no strings attached. Meredith considers an amorous German and the second son of an English lord as potential fathers, but when her handsome gynecologist shows up at the behest of the film's lead actress, Meredith finds herself battling genuine feelings for him. Despite its occasional lack of emotion, McLaren's debut is quirky fun. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
LEAH MCLAREN lives in Toronto and
Grafton, Ontario.

Customer Reviews

A tale of a woman on the hunt for a complete life
Reviewed by Stephanie Rollins for Reader Views (2/07)

Meredith is a continuity girl. What is that? She explains, "She was the error-catcher. The needle-in-the-haystack finder." She made sure that movie clips flowed correctly. Did he have ice in his glass in the last clip? Did she have her hair up in the last scene? These were the details Meredith fussed over.

Meredith's fertility is foremost on her mind. She turns 35, and she thinks, "My eggs are thirty-five today." She even goes to prenatal yoga, and she is not pregnant. She is not even having sex. She does not even have a boyfriend. However, she is on a mission to change all of that.

She has given up on love. She just wants a baby; therefore, she starts to see men as sacks of sperm. As her gynecologist explains, "Meredith, babies grow out of stem cells. The love part comes later."

Surely she can find a guy to have a one-night stand with. The problem is that the guy has to have desirable DNA. She is "gene shopping." Meredith's friend describes a possible guy, "I mean, Mere, he seems perfect--tall, good skin, lots of hair. He's a doctor, so he can't be dumb."

So, does Meredith find the right sperm bag? Does she end of pregnant? You have to read "The Continuity Girl" to figure this out. The answer will surprise you.

"The Continuity Girl" is hilarious. It is the kind of book you want to immediately tell your friends about. McLaren writes scenes in a way that makes you think you are there with the characters.

In one part of the book, Meredith's mother pours Jack Daniel's down her body and down her unmentionables in a dramatic act of foreplay. She then jumps up. She is in pain. "Before she knew it she was up and running around the room, clutching her crotch and howling like a woman on fire (which in a sense, she was)."

The author's style reminds me of "The Nanny Diaries" by Emma Mclaughlin and Nicola Kraus. The humor reminds me of Janet Ivanovich, author of the "Stephanie Plum" novels. I have already called my friends to tell them of "The Continuity Girl." Read and recommend to your friends.

Deeper than you would think.
As a 33-year-old woman, I bought this book, thinking it would resonate with some of the life events that my peers and I are starting to experience. While that is not exactly the case, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this book. The details and characters in it are very rich, and there are some great twists-- made even better by the fact that they were somewhat believable twists in relation to the plot. The heroine's mother is absolutely eccentric and hilarious, and there is a nice little mystery (who is the heroine's real father?) that is carried successfully throughout the story. Also, I actually learned a lot about the unglamorous side of filmmaking!

Timely topic for 30-somethings but ...
Easy read, and reminded me of the summer I read four Harlequin novels a day in junior high, this was a fluffy book with contemporary, timely issues for the single girl.