Different from Candace Bushnell's other works, *Lipstick Jungle is a single-lined story concerning three typically successful women who melt in different edges of the modern city full of skyscrapers resembling lipsticks.
*Until I composed this piece, I'd only read Sex and the City, Four Blondes,and this one. So it's a little bit like jumping to such conclusion. One Fifth Avenue is of course the counter stereotype!
If your first taste of the contemporary Manhattan novelist and ex-columnist is this book( say, me), you may find it similar to most of the feminine fictions taking place in a metropolitan city,New York, to be specified, in which countless blondes (all A-list and B-list or B-list on the way) leading a luxo and independent life, spending most nights sipping a martini in a one-shoulder cocktail dress, or having sex like males(one night stand, might be), attending galas in costume-made gowns and antique jewelry, talking about relationships as though about weather or a newly released couture line, contemplating marriages, careers and life.
Generally, Candace's novels' share the very simple theme--sex and the city, since I can't boil it down better. With her stiletto-sharp wit and astonishingly enjoyable and deep clairvoyance, her works stand out and rank top.
She reveals a real vanity fair, in which super beautiful single or spoused but still available women have an affair with jaw-droppingly gorgeous underwear models. In her Manhattan world, women take the rein. They marry fancy young men and pay all the outcomes of the family. Wendy, a film producer who got a hit being nominated in 6 Oscars, and one of the three heroines, is the sample of powerful wife. Her two intimates, Victory, a haute couturier, single, forty-two, is hanging out with a billionaire while herself is a millionaire; Nico, a magazine' chief manager, married with one daughter, is in a dilemma between lust and moral code.
Though ranking high in this dramatic city in most people's eyes, all three women are enduring their difficult and harsh time(or harsh relatively). Despite those visible troubles, the hand of age is also penetrating their faces, figures and thoughts.
Merely judging from the cover-page photo and her first book SATC,I conceive Candace Bushnell herself is one of the Manhattan girls, highly trendy, materialistic and mammonistic.As a blessed female innating not only beauty but brain, she sets an antithesis of the common bias towards pretty women, blondes esp(If she is a natural blonde).She proves that intelligence and appearance can be gained simultaneously, and the male governed fashion empire is ruled by a female pharaoh. In her opinion, women can actually achieve as high as men (take Nico as a stereotype) and uncapable males, no matter how fancy and handsome they are, are to be despised(like Wendy's ex-husband, Who-Knows-His-Name).Though not literally in black and white, the world coined by Candace is rich in opportunities for those who are eager to dream and dare to pursue, and possibilities for thosebearing downs and outs to regain the power and belief.
Candace's books are definitely readable. I'd call them page-turners. As press praised, she is a Jane Austen with a martini.