conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled I'm Not Julia Roberts about Beatrix, Liv, Tate with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author, whose third YA novel <I>Good Girls</I> is due this fall, starts off with a fresh, sardonic wit in this linked collection of divorce stories, but the unnerving stepchildren, sordid affairs and malevolent exes soon begin to blur. Suburban, self-absorbed Lu ("Lupe Klein, neither Hispanic nor Jewish") never expected to play mother to Ward Harrison's three complicated sons or have to deal with his ex-wife, Beatrix. While Beatrix is in a state of blind marital bliss with her new husband, Alan, she is not ready for Alan's mean-spirited, teenage daughter, Liv. Liv's mother, Roxie, not yet remarried but dating her friend Moira's unscrupulous ex-, Tate, is desperately trying to figure out how to balance her relationship with Tate while maintaining her bond with Liv. There are five couples in all, including Moira and second husband Ben, and Tate's sister Glynn (divorced from Derek) and her second husband, George&mdash;plus assorted children. A chapter moving backward in time and composed of e-mails, instant messages and snail mail detailing their entanglements is more disorienting than anything else. <I>(Jan.)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Suburban, self-absorbed Lu ("Lupe Klein, neither Hispanic nor Jewish") never expected to play mother to Ward Harrison's three complicated sons or have to deal with his ex-wife, Beatrix. While Beatrix is in a state of blind marital bliss with her new husband, Alan, she is not ready for Alan's mean-spirited, teenage daughter, Liv. Liv's mother, Roxie, not yet remarried but dating her friend Moira's unscrupulous ex-, Tate, is desperately trying to figure out how to balance her relationship with Tate while maintaining her bond with Liv. There are five couples in all, including Moira and second husband Ben, and Tate's sister Glynn (divorced from Derek) and her second husband, George&mdash;plus assorted children. A chapter moving backward in time and composed of e-mails, instant messages and snail mail detailing their entanglements is more disorienting than anything else. <I>(Jan.)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I'm Not Julia Roberts
  Songs to accompany your life: "Heart like a Raisin"; "The Propeller Beneath My Wings"; "Time and Time Again in a Bottle"; "I Want to Smack Your Hand"; "Crazy."
  The children were ugly. All scabbed knees and crooked teeth, lank ponytails and greasy bangs, stained purple mouths unhinged to the uvulas. They rushed at their parents and at one another, swinging heavy backpacks, pelting chalky pebbles, kicking out with their thick institutional shoes.
  Lu stood away from the little clots of moms and the occasional dad, smoking a cigarette. She had quit some six months before, but when her husband told her that she would have to care for the boys all by herself for the week he was in Dallas, something thin and brittle inside her snapped. After four days with her nerves stretched colorless, smoking was the only thing keeping the cancerous thoughts from finding form on her tongue.
  She smashed the butt under her boot while she eyed the school entrance, the endless stream of children draining from it. She watched as stout women in teddy bear sweatshirts tenderly clasped grape-sticky kids to their bosoms. Scraps of conversation floated around her.
  In front of her, a tall boy plucked a knot of hair from the scalp of a smaller boy. The small one smacked a palm to his head and howled as the tall one waggled the knot, its tiny white roots quivering.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: two more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Moira sucked her breath in sharply through her nose, the way she did when she was trying to keep herself from saying horrible, terrible, cruel things, things that, if I read the look on her face correctly, she thought you deserved to hear. She had been sucking her breath through her nose a lot since her favorite uncle was diagnosed with cancer and since he had refused to get treatment for it.
  Ashleigh's narrowed eyes wished many gruesome deaths upon her mother, but Moira, unfortunately for Ashleigh, didn't even catch head colds. I watched Ashleigh ram the "shirt" into the tiny silver bag in which it had been delivered to her, probably by some slatternly store clerk with black lipstick and a secret pierced labia, and added my two cents' worth.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Moira sucked her breath in sharply through her nose, the way she did when she was trying to keep herself from saying horrible, terrible, cruel things, things that, if I read the look on her face correctly, she thought you deserved to hear. She had been sucking her breath through her nose a lot since her favorite uncle was diagnosed with cancer and since he had refused to get treatment for it.
  Ashleigh's narrowed eyes wished many gruesome deaths upon her mother, but Moira, unfortunately for Ashleigh, didn't even catch head colds.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs. Start with the sentence 'She didn't know whether to laugh or to wince'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She didn't know whether to laugh or to wince. "Thanks," she said. And then: "I am married. As we speak."
  But rather than hearing this for what it was, her shredded history in a nutshell, he saw it as an opportunity. The hand was back, rubbing her cheek, her neck. "So, what's the shirt look like today?"
  That's how she'd thought about it when she first allowed herself to think of Mr. Tasty Pants rising naked from a bathtub: harmless, just a little diversion. A person can divert themselves right out of their own lives. "I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know anything."
  She ran, trying to imitate Vamoose, to make her body a metronome, her breath a chant, but she couldn't shut down the streaming video in her head. After Devin's graduation ceremony, the audience had wandered en masse down to the football field, searching for their offspring or the offspring of their spouses or friends. It took twenty minutes of recon to find Devin, after which everyone stood around him awkwardly, like common folk waiting for a chance to shake hands with the president. Lu wondered how Devin felt about being the center of things, about his parents' split that made him both far too important and not important enough. Devin did his best, punching his younger brothers in the arms and kissing his mother, grinning as his stepfather took photographs. He pushed away his father's outstretched hand and gathered Ward in a hug, slapping at his back. When he came to Lu, he smiled, not in the frantic and vaguely lascivious way of his middle teens, but warmly, gently. "Thanks for coming, Loop," he murmured, and kissed her, too. Watching him perform the delicate negotiations his fractured family required of him, Lu got a cramp in her throat, because she realized that she had had some tiny part in his life, even if it was a stupid part, or an annoying part, or simply a part he had to bear. And because she wished that she could love him even more for it, wished that her love weren't so mean and small and given to hiccups, like the reception on a broken radio.
  When the balloon hit, when the water broke, it wasn't the blast of cold that she would have expected, but a warm torrent, like something fed and ripened by her own body, like something offered up to the world in a single bright burst. But she didn't yell, she didn't stop. She ran the gauntlet, willing to take another shot.