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 ...

WTF did I just read? Candace Bushnell, I know Manhattan has some vain and money/career driven people living there but please, let's not scare anyone away. I feel like I should be ashamed to live and love NYC. Yes, we are the city that loves money, hot careers, and hard to get into restaurants but we do have a heart.

I felt like the stories were getting more boring and stupider as I was reading. She makes it seem like marriage is this horrible event that you force upon yourself and only stay married for social status. Maybe, I'm not rich or posh enough to relate to this book. Also, I never had more WTF moments while reading a book.

When I read these kinds of books, I wonder how they get published.

I got this book at my local library and I'm so glad I didn't pay for it! I hated it. I couldn't even get through the whole thing. I read 2 1/2 stories and thats all I could stand. I had never read any of Candace Bushnell's books but I love the television series Sex and the City. Apparently the writing on the series is about 50 times better than her writing. The characters in the book were so horrible I was just hoping they would all jump off a cliff. Do not waste your time on this book.

* Mild spoilers, although it doesn't really matter since I recommend not reading this book at all *

"Four Blondes" is one of the worst books I have read in a long time. Usually, I don't bother finishing a book when I don't like it, but I felt like I had wasted so much time reading this that I might as well finish it. I kept hoping the next story would be better, but they never were. I didn't mind the last one, but it was quite short and still wasn't great.

This book is composed of four short stories about women who live vapid, depressing lives. According to the back cover, this book is supposed to be a look into the lives of four elite women in New York as they choose their path and passion in life. I would have loved to read a book about that, but that isn't what I got. Instead, I got four accounts about equally terrible women with no real ending to any of them.

The first woman is a model who spends every summer with a different man so she can stay at his summer house in the Hamptons. It seems like it's going somewhere interesting as she starts a new career, but then she gets a big modeling contract and her life is exactly what she wants it to be and I'm not quite sure what the message is supposed to be. The second woman is a columnist who thinks she's better than people like the first woman because she has a real job and is married when in reality she's just as bad as the women she belittles.

The third woman is a literal princess who is like a combination of the first two, shallow like the first and in a loveless marriage like the second. She seems to have a lot of mental health issues, possibly depression with some paranoia, that is approached in a joking way like "she's so crazy" instead of being the serious issue that it is. Finally, the fourth woman is on some quest/writing an article to find a husband in the UK and there's a lot of meaningless discussions about sex but it's so short we don't get a sense of her as a character at all.

To summarize, do not read this book. I read it in two days and instead of making my life better, it made it worse because of how depressing it was.

Fascinating and depressing reading a book that was published twenty-two years ago whose major themes are still relevant today. Objectification of women, how society weaponizes women's sexuality and uses it against them, the unequal distribution of household chores and child rearing duties in straight marriage...the list goes on. This book is also very funny and Bushnell writes about NYC and its social stratagem like no one else.

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 the third story mentioned some characters from the first and the second but they were not really intertwined or related...it was kind of just thrown in. I usually enjoy stories where the characters are linked and that would have redeemed this book just a little but the way she did it really just kind of annoyed me more than anything...all-in-all...I did not like this book and would not recommend it to anyone...ever

Unlike those who gave it low ratings, I thought that, just maybe, the author was very subtly commenting on the meaningless of a material based society. Anyway, it certain made me feel empty

Ugh. that says it all. I'd like to get back the hours I spent reading this.

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 death. Or worse.

Janey is selfish, but she is far from simple. Her mother is a French bitch and at some point, in Trading Up, the story goes into how she's more fucked up than we thought, that she was on a yacht with this Arab guy that basically paid her to have sex. I mean, hello? You have to be pretty damaged to be so detached, so divorced from yourself and whoever you used to be that you are actually okay with meaningless sex and getting paid for it. Janey has issues, a lot of them, and yes, as I said, she is selfish, but all of Bushnell's characters are complex, even if not directly. In this book, Janey tries to convince herself that she doesn't need a guy to live the life she wants (a glamorous one, with a house in the Hamptons in the summer) and she almost convinces herself that she is independent because she's going places, writing a script for some douche bag who pays for a summer house for her. She almost fools herself into thinking that she's something, that she has love, but then he shows up with his wife and Janey goes back to being the Janey that we got to know at first--she doesn't really show any emotion, she recedes into her selfish behaviors and fools herself into thinking that she might do something--anything--someday and be famous, rich. fabulous.

The second story is also complex. Winnie is a type A character and marries a man because she wants everything to be perfect in her life. And when he doesn't seem perfect, she can't handle it and he can't handle being criticized and at the end, he has sex with some chick that works with his wife and Winnie sleeps with a movie star, Tanner, because it's freeing. James thinks Winnie is joking when he tells her, probably because it's so out of character for her to do that and he's too much of a pussy to tell her that he fooled around with that other girl. So their relationship frailly goes on existing because neither one of them knows how to properly communicate with one another and it's just really sad. In the end, though, Winnie actually says something nice to James, about his work and it's like sleeping with other people might have actually fixed (or helped) their fucked up life. It's a story about types of people and control/power in relationships, which, any reader with sense could see is a very delicate thing to write about (well) and that the characters aren't boring at all. Maybe these people picked up this book expecting erotica on every other page and were sad to see that this book is both about love and about how love isn't enough or fades or can be really, really shitty at times.

The third story was really interesting, about a girl who becomes a princess after marrying some prince guy. Meaning that she has to deal with the media hounding her and in the beginning, she is horribly depressed. And can't leave the house, can't do anything because of how things are, how her life is. And her husband is bleakly absent. He keeps his emotions concealed and she is learning just how hard it is to be married to someone in the public eye. I think there's a lot more to this story than it at first seems and it was actually very interesting to read because she suffers from insane paranoia and possibly killed someone (and is friends with a complete psycho lady, but that character is a nice foil to help Cecelia (the princess) get over some of her issues).

The last story was decent, but not great. It was piece-y and felt like Bushnell was just throwing in old "Sex and the City" material because she had some extra lying around. It was sort of lame for that reason, but the ending was pretty great. She leaves England, sad that she has to leave a man behind who has just told her that he loves her. She thinks that the sensible thing to do is to go back to New York without him, leaving him behind, possibly missing her chance at a marriage, at love, etc.

The last bit that really was good in the book was this bit:

God, I was so fickle. I'd left Rory only two hours ago, and already I was thinking about another man.

What was it I wanted?

The story.

I wanted the story. I wanted the big, great, inspiring story about an unmarried career woman who goes to London on assignment and meets the man of her dreams and marries him. She gets the big ring and the big house and the adorable children, and she lives happily ever after. But stories are not reality, no matter how much we might wish them so.

And that's not so bad.

And then, because it would be too bad ass to end the book on that note, Bushnell has this character meet the love of her life on the flight back home. I was actually getting kind of excited about how it might end with an unmarried, single woman at the end, but oh, well. I'm glad there was that point of clarity sticking through at the end, though. I almost felt okay not ever getting married or whatever.

I think the best thing that can be taken away from reading Bushnell is that she is, in fact, trying to honestly chronicle how shitty it feels to run around looking for love, looking for sex, looking for a non-jerk and having that ever-persistent feeling, that, in the end, you might not have your best friend waking up next to you every morning. She does a very good job at looking at women, at society and talking candidly about what's going on. I agree with the aforementioned comment about Bushnell being the twenty-first century's Jane Austen and I applaud her for at least TRYING to be honest and not just writing cheesy bodice-ripping stories that ladies read to get off on love and sex or whatever. I like reading real stuff because people aren't characters and at least Bushnell is paying dues to the fact that people (and relationships, love, etc) are complicated and not easily unwound in a happy-go-lucky type of book where the girl just falls in love (like we knew she would and expected she would).

I think that this book was fabulous. I really enjoyed the Sex and the City book previously and this one was different and still really great. It is very dark in a lot of places but a lot of fun. It's an easy read and will be a good fit especially for women and gay men.

I am not somebody who likes the current trend for political correctness and self censorship so I found this book very entertaining and very edgy and I enjoyed hearing about the characters and stories.

I think the reason Candace Busnell is such a great author is that she is willing to be honest about her characters' vanity and the way they see themselves and the world. It is something that distinguishes her from a lot of other authors. Not everybody will like this book (if you are easily "triggered" you may not but then again, maybe it would be the perfect thing for you) but I would definitely recommend!

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 from schools like Barnard and Wellesley sneer at minorities while aping their victim rhetoric. They use the language of victims while fighting not for equality but for the privileges of white male aristocrats. (One part where the "smart" heroine is shocked because on AMAZON anyone can trash a book by an "important" feminist author left me smiling for days.)

On the other hand, as irreverent and clear-sighted as Candace Bushnell can be about important things, there's also a certain amount of silliness and snobbery that seems to come directly from the author, not the characters. For example, there's a whole story about a fashion model with no work skills and no formal education at all who is "shocked" that her equally brainless baby sister would marry a rock star -- because supposedly rock stars are "beneath" jet-set fashion models. The problem is, Bushnell knows nothing about rock and roll, indeed nothing about music, and never allows "Digger" to speak for himself. In real life, a tough boy like Jim Morrison or Eminem would have ripped Jane's lungs out -- even a drippy mama's boy like Elvis Presley or Kurt Cobain would have managed a put down or two. Yet in this book the rock star and his just-off-the-farm parents are supposed to be "terrified" of their brittle, artificial jet-set mother-in-law.

As my Depression-raised, Harlem-born grandfather used to say, "aw, who's gonna believe this?"

Put Ma Joad up against Lily Bart in a fist fight (or even just a catfight) and it's not Ma Joad who's going to the hospital.

When she wants to be, Candace Bushnell can be one smart cookie. But the rest of the time she's just a product whore pain in the ass.

Four only somewhat interesting stories that don’t really have a happy ending or a moral