Summer and the City (The Carrie Diaries #2)

It\’s tough to be young in the city… the city. But for Carrie Bradshaw there is a pull from New York City calling to her like nothing else ever has. She wants to be a writer and has one chance, a mere two months, to convince everyone she should stay in the city rather than go to Brown in the fall. In Summer and the City: A Carrie Diaries Novel, by Candace Bushnell, we finally get to see how Carrie\’s first summer in the big city makes her a New Yorker permanently. Carrie is torn between the other kids in her writing class and the tantalizing life of one Ms. Samantha Jones. The kids in her class are a mix of New York savvy college kids who know their way around the restaurants and clubs and kids from out of town who still can\’t use the subway, but they are all her age, experiencing the same things she is. Samantha takes Carrie in when her landlady kicks her out and she has no where to go. She also takes Carrie out to her usual haunts, introducing her to New York\’s most important up and comers. When Carrie returns to her friends from class telling them how she is dating Bernard Singer, the most coveted new playwright on Broadway, and hung out with a bevy of models, fashion designers, writers, and artists, the others are clearly impressed. But Carrie can\’t get herself to really write. When she finds out Bernard is recently divorced, she is inspired to write a play about a husband and wife. As she continues working on her play, she comes to some conclusions about herself and the others around her. First, some people just aren\’t cut out to survive NYC. Also, some people may seem like talented artists when they are really silly fools who are just as miserable as everyone else (just with better tables in restaurants). And finally, Carrie Bradshaw has changed. Everything she does and thinks now is clearly through New York City tinted glasses. When she returns home or a friend comes to visit her, they clearly know she has changed. Now all she has to do is realize it. But will she, before she has to go to Brown? I bet you already know the answer! This sequel was much better than the first book for me because I got a chance to see Carrie in NYC, but it still wasn\’t a phenomenal book. it was entertaining and interesting, but only because I loved the show on HBO. I think if I gave these books to a kids who had never seen the show, they might quickly grow bored with the story. But knowing who Samantha and Miranda become made this much more interesting for me. This series might just be a YA series meant for fans and only fans. There is quite a lot of sex in the story, but none of it is overly graphic or specific. Instead, it is mostly everyone talking about sex and virginity as opposed to Bushnell \”showing\” it. Still I probably wouldn\’t give this to a younger high school student, more for the slowness of the story than the sexual content. I am not sure if this is it for the Carrie Diaries, but if there is more, I will most likely read it. I won\’t drop everything to read it, but I will get to it eventually.

I definitely enjoyed this second installment of the Carrie Diaries. The way they brought in Samantha Jones was particularly interesting — partially in contrast to how she is in the television show Sex and the City, but illustrating why she is how she is in that series. Overall I\’d say the book does better with her than the Carrie Diaries tv show did with the character. The book takes a completely different direction. What was very odd about this book was it seemed that Ms. Bushnell was using Mr. Big from Sex and the City in a modified way in the form of one of Carrie\’s boyfriends in this novel. Just the language he used like \”kiddo\” kept making me think of Big and not really enjoy or take the character seriously. I thought the Carrie Diaries tv series did a better job of how Carrie got rid of her \”v\” card, but all together this novel seemed more in the Carrie character\’s element, mostly given that it is actually set in the City. The cliffhanger at the end was predictable, but welcomed.

Carrie Bradshaw is back in Bushnell\’s latest installment. This time, seventeen-year-old Carrie has arrived in NYC and has aspirations of becoming a famous writer. First, she has to survive the city and all it holds: friends, frenemies, love, and critics. Fans of the hit TV show Sex and the City will enjoy reading the blossoming friendship between Carrie, Samantha, and Miranda. Bushnell delivers a typical SATC-style plot with this novel. As a fan of the show, I enjoyed it. As a fan of YA lit, I enjoyed it. It was refreshing to read pure chick lit again…but also because I was an avid fan of the show when it originally aired on HBO. I am anxiously awaiting for the third installment when Charlotte is added to the mix.

I was a bit disappointed with this book. It was an engaging and entertaining story, but I kind of got the feeling that the author was drawing too much from the \”Sex and the City\” television show rather than her original \”Sex and the City\” novel when it came time to further develop the character of Carrie, and especially the characters of Samantha and Miranda. Now, the characters aren\’t parallel to the girls in the series. Their situations and personalities are different, but I still thought that many of their characteristics were pulled from the show and weren\’t really in line with the original book. The author is obviously trying to capitalize on the success of the series with these new SATC-themed books, and I don\’t blame her a bit for that. But she could stand to be truer to her own material.

I just finished reading this book and read Carrie Diaries right before it. Summer and the City is much more relatable to the Sex and the City show than the previous book. Carrie spends her first summer in New York and we see her frienship with Samantha and Miranda blossom along with her unusual fashion style and her writing and men struggles. You can easily read this book without reading the Carrie Diaries, but a few characters do return in this book and it is helpful to know who they are. Miranda\’s character is spot on to the character in the tv series. Overall, this is a very fun read and gives me an extra dose of Sex and the City that I long for.

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