Daisy Dooley Does Divorce

August 6, 2007
The title is a hint of what to expect in this frustrating traipse through divorcedom from the great niece of that guy who wrote Dr. Zhivago
. Originally released in the U.K. as the novelization of Pasternak's Daily Mail
column, the novel stars Daisy Dooley, a 39-year-old “dopey divorcée” searching for a man unlike the “dodgy men with dire agendas” that dominated her past. Since Daisy stopped working to please her husband, she now lives with her mother and her dachsunds named Dougie, Donald, Dominic, Doughnut, Des, Deborah, Desdemona, Diandra, Dennis, Dusty and so on. She has the inevitable “girlie gossip and giggle” with her married friend Lucy and her commitment-phobic pal Jess. Then there's her best male friend, Miles, a “rollickingly rich” philanderer. As Daisy plunges into the dating pool, looking up old flames and embarking on disastrous affairs, Pasternak eventually gets into the meat of a conventional chick-lit story, but by then it's too late to reverse the uneasy feeling that another annoying alliterative bomb will explode. (It will.) There are enough dopey characters to populate a sitcom (one is currently in development with ABC), but the reading experience is less than exhilarating.