Sad Desk Salad

Lighthearted. Jessica Grose’s debut novel, Sad Desk Salad, is a humorous excursion into the out-of-balance and conflicted life of a blogger. Protagonist Alex Lyons writes a gossip blog for the site Chick Habit. The pressure of feeding the blog with new posts leads Alex to bathe irregularly, dress in a dirty muumuu and eat a salad at her home desk when she has time to eat. She hopes her audience of women at work eating their own sad desk salads will generate lots of hits, especially for her lunchtime posts, because she fears losing her job. Her relationships experience the impact of her stress as she addresses the concerns of how much privacy the web allows. I found this novel to be funny in many places, while the subject matter allowed for a degree of seriousness. I expect the target audience for the novel is young women, so readers in that demographic should certainly sample an excerpt to see if this style is to your taste. For an older guy, this was not humorous enough to rate a recommendation for humor. If it is satire or parody, I didn’t get it. I was mildly entertained as Grose took me in a lighthearted way into a world I know little about and to characters for whom I developed no empathy. Rating: Two-star (Mildly Recommended) Click here to purchase Sad Desk Salad from amazon.com.