Product Description

With a brilliant comic voice as well as Jane Austen's penchant for social satire, Candace Bushnell, who with Sex and the City changed forever how we view New York City, female friendships, and the love of a good pair of Manolos, now brings us a sharply observant, keenly funny, wildly entertaining latter day comedy of manners. Modern-day heroine Janey Wilcox is a lingerie model whose reach often exceeds her grasp, and whose new-found success has gone to her head. As we follow Janey's adventures, Bushnell draws us into a seemingly glamorous world of $100,000 cars, hunky polo players and media moguls, Fifth Avenue apartments, and relationships whose hidden agendas are detectable only by the socially astute. But just as Janey enters this world of too much money and too few morals, unseen forces conspire to bring her down, forcing her to reexamine her values about love and friendship-and how far she's really willing to go to realize her dreams.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #131542 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-01
• Released on: 2005-07-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 600 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780786890873
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Janey Wilcox is an M.A.W. (that's Model/Actress/Whatever to the uninitiated). The problem with Janey, the protagonist of Candace Bushnell's first novel, Trading Up, is not the M or the A part. It's the W. Here is a rare alphabetical anomaly: In Janey's case, W stands for "prostitute." Oh, Janey never crosses the line into actual hookerdom, but she does sleep with extremely wealthy men in the hopes they'll improve her status, her financial situation, or her lifestyle. When we first met Janey in Bushnell's novella collection 4 Blondes, she was up to her usual tricks (so to speak)--scamming a guy for a Hamptons vacation rental. At the opening of Trading Up, her fortunes have improved. She's now the star of a Victoria's Secret ad campaign, and as such she's found access to undreamed-of echelons of New York society. She makes friends with Mimi Kilroy, a senator's daughter "at the very top of the social heap in New York." She gets invited to all the best parties. And she finally finds a wealthy man who will actually marry her: Seldon Rose, a powerful entertainment industry executive. Of course, Janey's social ambitions are not stoppered by her marriage to Seldon, and the clash between her expectations (more parties!) and his (normal life) send Janey into a tailspin that leads to heartbreak. Bushnell is clearly trying to channel Edith Wharton (The Custom of the Country is even invoked by Janey as a screenplay idea), but ends up sounding a lot more like a cross between Tama Janowitz and Judith Krantz. This is a novel about shopping and sex, and while it's fizzy enough, it's not Cristal. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
"It was the beginning of the summer of the year 2000, and in New York City, where the streets seemed to sparkle with the gold dust filtered down from a billion trades in a boomtown economy, it was business as usual." In other words, it is business as usual for bestselling author Bushnell (Sex and the City; 4 Blondes), who expands here on the career of shallow, predatory Janey Wilcox. In 4 Blondes, Wilcox was a mildly famous one-time model who bedded men based on their ability to provide her with a great house in the Hamptons for the summer. Now she has become a Victoria's Secret model, a bona fide success in her own right. As the latest summer in the Hamptons kicks off, Wilcox becomes the new best friend of the socialite Mimi Kilroy, who is eager to introduce beautiful Janey to the very rich Selden Rose, the new head of the HBO-like MovieTime. Unlike Janey's many previous hookups, Selden is the marrying kind. What ensues is a grim if well-observed account of a match made in hell. Here's the problem. There is a black hole in the center of the book in the form of Janey Wilcox, a character so dull and humorless that she makes this whole elaborate enterprise one long, boring slog. Granted, Bushnell sets out to chronicle the workings of "one of those people for whom the superficial comfortingly masks an inner void," but Wilcox is not evil enough to be interesting, not talented enough to be Mr. Ripley. Wilcox proceeds from model/prostitute to "Model/Prostitute" on the cover of the Post. But who will care? Bushnell has committed the real crime here: failure to entertain.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In Four Blondes (2000), Bushnell introduced readers to Janey Wilcox, a beautiful semi-successful model (and ruthlessly determined social climber) who uses her unappealing but well-connected middle-aged boyfriends for access to New York's A-list social scene. Trading Up finds Janey, now a Victoria's Secret model, conniving her way up yet another rung of New York's slippery high-society ladder, this time with the help of glamorous old-money socialite Mimi Kilroy. Delighted with her new life at the center of the Hamptons' social whirl, Janey is determined to cement her position, and before long she marries Selden Rose, the fabulously wealthy CEO of MovieTime. Everything is perfect--but just when Janey's future seems assured, her sordid past rears up its ugly head in the shape of Comstock Dibble, a former boyfriend who's also a bitter business rival of Selden's. Four Blondes won Bushnell critical acclaim and commercial success with its razor-sharp depiction of New York high life as lived by four women. Played out in the same world of air kisses and backstabbing, Janey's story is satisfyingly dishy and as addictively readable the second time around. Expect high demand for Bushnell's latest. Meredith Parets
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

An absolute waste of paper...
This is the first book that I have read by Candace Bushnell and I was very disappointed. Instead of wasting the paper it was printed on, the story should have instead been made into a cheesy Lifetime movie starring Tori Spelling. The plot was slow, boring and predictable while the main characters were detestable. Don't waste your time reading this book!

Not the worst book I've read, but I still wouldn't bother
This is a pretty mediocre book. Its worst flaw is that every one of the characters is so downright despicable that you end up not caring a jot what happens to any of them. You find yourself hoping that Janey will get her come-uppance, but unfortunately when she does, it's short-lived. The writing is barely okay, certainly nothing outstanding, and the plot development is sluggish.

On the positive side, Candace Bushnell obviously knows the Manhattan social scene well and at times you feel that the descriptions are depressingly accurate. I say depressing because it comes across as being such a shallow and superficial world that I am happy to be well removed from it. It's kind of fun to guess at the inspiration behind some of the characters - Gwyneth Paltrow, Rupert Everett, Anna Wintour, Aerin Lauder...

I continued with this book hoping it would get better. It didn't. It's not the worst book that I've read, but I still wouldn't recommend it.

A disappointment
This book was really not that fun of a read. I was expecting a light-hearted book with a plot and characters I would enjoy reading about, but did not find any of this with Trading Up.

The book is about Janey Wilcox, a Victoria's Secret model who uses anyone and everyone that comes into her life to make it to the top. From a socialite to several movie producers to her own sister, she uses them all to get what she wants.

The only reason I made it all the way through is because I kept thinking, this has to get better. I was wrong. By the end of the book I really did not care what happened to Janey and therefore didn't care that the ending was as bad as it was.

I'm disappointed and definitely would not recommend Trading Up.