61st out of 464 books
—
416 voters
Four Blondes
In her first book since the cultural phenomenon Sex and the City, Candace Bushnell triumphantly returned with the national best-seller Four Blondes, which The New York Times says "chronicles the glittering lives of semicelebrities, social aspirants, and moneyed folk ... [with] withering precision." Now her collection of novellas is available in paperback -- just in time to...more
Paperback, 256 pages
Published
June 8th 2001
by Grove Press
(first published 2000)
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This book doesn't even deserve one star. This has to be one of the worst books that I've ever read in my life. I only kept reading it in the ridiculous (and futile) hope that it surely would have to get better at some point. Surely the women who came up with the idea for Sex in the City couldn't possibly suck THAT bad as an author.
Well as it turns out, she can. Don't waste your time or anyone else's with this book. It's about 4 stupid women who make ridiculous choices and live lives consumed by...more
Well as it turns out, she can. Don't waste your time or anyone else's with this book. It's about 4 stupid women who make ridiculous choices and live lives consumed by...more
Terrible. I finally followed the 50 page rule, where if it's not good by the first 50 pages, dump it. This was the worst book I have ever attempted. I picked it up at a garage sale for a quarter because I enjoy "chick-lit", and Sex and The City was a hit show, I thought the author would at least have something worthwhile. Big mistake! The storyline and characters were so unrealistic, fake, and BORING! Don't bother.
Apr 27, 2008
Jess Driscoll
rated it
2 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
people who are Bushnell completionists
page 166: He's sitting in the living room in a red-and-white-striped shirt, suspenders still looped over his shoulders, drinking a beer with his buddies from the network whose names I still can't be bothered to remember, when I come down the stairs, wearing a white brocade dress with grey mink trim and long grey gloves. My mother is married to a fishmonger. My father is gay and lives in Paris. I am going to the ballet.
This book is not good. It is divided into four sections about four women with barely any brains and their stories never connect. At first I felt like I was missing some big secret underlying message about society while I was reading it, but then I thought that it was just about four stupid rich women.
The writing style of the second section almost made me quit reading. Sentence length averages 6 words and every other sentence is in parentheses which I think was meant for humor but ended up being...more
The writing style of the second section almost made me quit reading. Sentence length averages 6 words and every other sentence is in parentheses which I think was meant for humor but ended up being...more
Okay this book is disgusting - but i was trying to get a feel for the popularity of Candace Bushnell (of sex in the city fame)without watching sex in the city! I notice most people rate this book pretty low, so i guess even fans don't like this one.
It was just creepy. High "Ick" factor. As in the normalization of deviant sex ick.
However, i happened to be reading Ibsen's A Doll's House at the same time and it made a fascinating comparative study re: women's roles and what women have done with the...more
It was just creepy. High "Ick" factor. As in the normalization of deviant sex ick.
However, i happened to be reading Ibsen's A Doll's House at the same time and it made a fascinating comparative study re: women's roles and what women have done with the...more
And now we have a real dilemma: how do you honestly review a book that's so bad that you didn't really finish it and you were never interested in reading it in the first place?
Candace Bushnell (of Sex and the City fame) has written a book that is either disgusting in its skewed portrayal of vapid, mindless, and spiritually bankrupt women or genius in its satirical and ironic take on selfsame.
I'm going with the former.
Perhaps it deserves some kind of recognition at the very least for the entertai...more
Candace Bushnell (of Sex and the City fame) has written a book that is either disgusting in its skewed portrayal of vapid, mindless, and spiritually bankrupt women or genius in its satirical and ironic take on selfsame.
I'm going with the former.
Perhaps it deserves some kind of recognition at the very least for the entertai...more
I was hard in to the TV series Sex and the City and when I hear d about Candace Bushnell, I decided to read more books from her. I bought the 4 Blondes and I was not disappointed the style was crisp and very observing. The four women had one thing in common they are relatively rich and very beautiful, however it is not much in the city jungle, where you can always find someone younger and more beautiful. Life suck and it is even worse when main heroines are selfish and self obsessed. It is fine...more
May 01, 2008
Meghan
added it
I purposefully didn't rate this book, because it's the worst book I have EVER read. I only finished it on principle. Awful, awful, awful. In fact, when I go to Barnes & Noble, I actually consider placing a note on the shelf that holds this book, warning people!
Bushnell is one of the worse writers of all time. I hope she wakes up every morning and thanks whichever god she believes in because however she got Sex in the City published is supernatural. That someone saw past her schlocky prose to an award-winning television series is beyond me.
Four Blondes is a trite story about four women you couldn't care about if they were on fire on the midtown bus. Their stories, remarkably, are less interesting. Read this book only if you are being threatened with d...more
Four Blondes is a trite story about four women you couldn't care about if they were on fire on the midtown bus. Their stories, remarkably, are less interesting. Read this book only if you are being threatened with d...more
Jul 31, 2008
Jaime
rated it
1 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
absolutely no one
Recommended to Jaime by:
a friend
Honestly...this book is probably one of the worst books I have ever read...I did not enjoy it what-so-ever...I do not watch Sex and the City (i make fun more than anything) but my friend told me this is one of her favorite books and i had to read it. I hated the way it was written...The second story I could not stand all the parentheses and the third story the intitials bothered me also...I felt that the characters kind of sucked and you really could care less about them. I also did not like how...more
I only gave this 1 star because it was an easy read and I will admit a line or two was funny, however, it was hard for me to give it 1. The main reason I bought it was because it was written by the author of Sex and the City and I thought it was going to be interesting or at least follow characters that were similar to the ones in the TV series but I was dead wrong. I kept reading only hoping (assuming) that at some point it may get interesting. The book should be called 4 dumb blondes. It’s NOT...more
Before I launch into another diatribe about the enormous amount of crap that is this book, let me say that chick-lit CAN be smart, it can be fun and it can YES PLEASE have a protagonist that, while interested in dating and mating, isn't obsessed over it or derive ALL of her self-esteem from it.
...the problem is that's ALL this novel is about. I get the Sex and the City thing- I even loved the show for the first few seasons before they became walking cliches of superficiality and excess, but tha...more
...the problem is that's ALL this novel is about. I get the Sex and the City thing- I even loved the show for the first few seasons before they became walking cliches of superficiality and excess, but tha...more
Feb 12, 2012
Jessuina Lopez
rated it
1 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
not-worth-the-paper-they-are
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
Somehow I cannot believe that Candace Bushnell is a grown up women. Maybe she has some kind of syndrome, you know she looks mature but she is actually a 13 year old. I'm joking- it's mean to say something like that about 13 years old. Most teenagers could probably write something better than this, probably a lot of them do.
The only thing positive that I have to say about this book is that is not as bad as The Sex and City. That anorexics blonde in this novel has some funny moments, well tragico...more
The only thing positive that I have to say about this book is that is not as bad as The Sex and City. That anorexics blonde in this novel has some funny moments, well tragico...more
So I read this book with no expectations, one way or another. And then I came on here and was shocked to see every review was so horrible. The problem with Candace Bushnell is that everyone expects her to be fluffy chick lit because Sex and the City is the epitome of chick TV (and don't get me wrong, I love the show). Even the cover design of this book just makes it look like a beach read. But when I read Sex and the City (the book) I realized that's not the kind of writer Candace Bushnell is. W...more
It was the best of blondes -- it was the worst of blondes.
I was never a big SEX AND THE CITY fan. As a rule I prefer romance to chick lit. I like guaranteed happy endings, and I also prefer a more hopeful take on men than what you get from most literary or "feminist" fiction.
The point is, I approached 4 BLONDES with really low expectations. Yet it wasn't quite as bad as I expected. Some of the satire on career women and feminists is razor sharp. Bushnell really shows how "educated" white women...more
I was never a big SEX AND THE CITY fan. As a rule I prefer romance to chick lit. I like guaranteed happy endings, and I also prefer a more hopeful take on men than what you get from most literary or "feminist" fiction.
The point is, I approached 4 BLONDES with really low expectations. Yet it wasn't quite as bad as I expected. Some of the satire on career women and feminists is razor sharp. Bushnell really shows how "educated" white women...more
Ok, this book is written by the same woman who wrote "Sex and the City". Naturally I assumed it would be a fun, energetic read that I would thoroughly enjoy. Especially since the back cover of the book said things like "Hysterical" and such. I was not impressed by this book at all. Ask anyone, I enjoy almost every book I read, but this one didn't do anything for me. It was four stories told separately about four different women. The language was choppy and hard to follow, the characters were one...more
I like watching Sex and the City, a funny and interesting television show about four female friends and their love lives in the city. This book, however, is dreadful. I had a hard time getting through it. The characters and stories are not funny nor are they in any way interesting. You don't care about the characters, but almost sort of want them to wander into city traffic and get run over. Luckily I borrowed this from the library and didn't actually squander any of my hard-earned money on it.
First, you need treat Four Blondes as an independent book and not a byproduct of a writer of a hit TV series. Sex and the City was and still is such a massive hit that audiences use it as the totem pole to measure everything that Candace Bushnell writes. The quintessential Carrie candor was a creation of the show’s writers alone; if you read Bushnell’s newspaper columns from which the show is derived (there is an archive of all of them somewhere on the Internet), you will notice that her writing...more
It is interesting to see how unfavourable the majority of the reviews are connected to this title. I bought 4 Blondes and Sex and the City in 2002/03 at the height of Sex And The City's success on TV, curious to compare the latter against the story given by the author. A decade later, 4 Blondes remains unfinished. I can't remember being so completely annoyed with the characters contained within a book in all the years I've been reading, but this book brought me close to it. The only reason I hav...more
I was never a fan of "Sex and the city", I didn't watch the episodes, just glims of them. But I was curious enough to start reading this book when I learned who the author was.
This is the portrait of a material girl whose obsesion is to find a house to stay for the summer in the exclusive Hamptons, and how does she get them? She gets involves with men who have big houses there, the actors, writers, celebrities, people with social status. Why when men do what Janey does we consider them lucky bus...more
This is the portrait of a material girl whose obsesion is to find a house to stay for the summer in the exclusive Hamptons, and how does she get them? She gets involves with men who have big houses there, the actors, writers, celebrities, people with social status. Why when men do what Janey does we consider them lucky bus...more
It has been a devastating read, I did expect way better from Candace Bushnell after she was names best selling author of Sex and the City Even though I haven't read that book either, I assumed Four Blondes would be good. I should have expected better.
Not only was it boring but it didn't make sense, and I hated the fact thats none of them had a decent ending apart from the first one.
I liked the whole plot of the first story Nice N'Easy which is about Janey Wilcox (a B-list model) who scams rent...more
Not only was it boring but it didn't make sense, and I hated the fact thats none of them had a decent ending apart from the first one.
I liked the whole plot of the first story Nice N'Easy which is about Janey Wilcox (a B-list model) who scams rent...more
May 07, 2007
Shauna Mulligan
rated it
2 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
people who enjoy guilty pleasures
Good? Eh. Entertaining? Mostly. This book was like reading an episode of Sex and the City, except that the characters are less fun, more emotionally messed up and often married. They do have similar taste in shoes, drink a lot of cocktails and talk about sex a lot. It was a quick read -- good for the beach, airplane or anywhere you won't be embarrassed to be seen reading it.
First off, the cover promised a good dose of chick lit and the synopsis wasn't bad either. But then the trouble started; usually my choice in books isn't so bad and a book by the renowned author of 'Sex and the City' seemed too good to pass. Too bad it was a trashy book.
It will eventually find it way to trash 'cause it is too bad of a book to give it to someone even as a charity read. I wouldn't dare put anyone else through the same torture I went through. It is indeed a miracle that I finished...more
It will eventually find it way to trash 'cause it is too bad of a book to give it to someone even as a charity read. I wouldn't dare put anyone else through the same torture I went through. It is indeed a miracle that I finished...more
The author whose name is synonymous with her novel "Sex and the City" weighs in again with four loosely linked tales: in "Four Blondes" she returns with a quartet of novellas on her favorite subject -- the mating habits of wealthy sex-, status-, and media-obsessed New Yorkers. These are people for whom a million or two does not make one rich, and who consider Louis Vuitton and Prada bare necessities.
The novel is broken up into 4 sections, each one dedicated to a different shade of blonde and the...more
The novel is broken up into 4 sections, each one dedicated to a different shade of blonde and the...more
I was surprised I even finished this book, whenever I read something I hate I rarely ever even consider finishing it. However the "25 books per year" requirement made me. I'd like to start by saying I read this during a wiggity-wack barbeque during memorial day weekend, how I decided reading this would be better than ribs I do not know. The book is basically Sex and the City with no wit and more blondes. We follow the romantic endeavors of four middle aged New York City women who just can't find...more
One of the tasks in my reading challenge was to read a book you started but never finished. I hardly ever do that, and the only two I could come up with were The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco and this. I wasn't really in the mood to tackle something heavy, so I figured I'd give Four Blondes, another shot. I still hated it. The first time, I made it through the first story, and quit on the second one. I was pretty close to the end, I just decided I didn't care about the characters anymo...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
I saw the horrible reviews this book has gotten and while I only give it 2 stars, I still think that most people have this book a really hard time. I think people should lighten up! Sometimes books aren't meant to have these uber-deep commentaries about life or love, etc. Sometimes it's just a book made to be enjoyed for exactly what it is.
I didn't think this book was all that bad. I thought the 4 short stories were pretty interesting for the most part. I didn't think they were a waste of time...more
I didn't think this book was all that bad. I thought the 4 short stories were pretty interesting for the most part. I didn't think they were a waste of time...more
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Candace Bushnell is the critically acclaimed, international best-selling novelist whose first book, Sex and the City, was the basis for the HBO hit series and subsequent blockbuster movie. Her fourth novel, Lipstick Jungle became a popular television series on NBC. Bushnell’s novels include Four Blondes (2000), Trading Up (2003), Lipstick Jungle (2005), One Fifth Avenue (2008) and The Carrie Diari...more
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