conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled Hooking Up about Summer, tweens, Nannys with the genre: Teen & Young Adult, Literature & Fiction
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is the award-winning author of several dozen popular books for teens and 'tweens, including Summer Nannys , Summer Share: Cape Cod , and the T*Witches series, of which over two million are currently in print. Her prolific resume also includes original novels based on the movie Clueless , and the TV show Moesha. Her biographies of Prince William, Nancy Kerrigan, Hanson and New Kids on the Block have all landed on the New York Times bestseller list.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled Hooking Up about with the genre: Romance, Contemporary
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: When she is not writing, collecting gemstones and spending time with her family of dogs, children and a husband, the author is a country music DJ and the lead singer in a classic rock band.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first four paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Hooking Up
  It's uncomfortable being compelled to sum things up so baldly, but here, in as few words as possible, is what we have: a critically acclaimed novel selling at an astonishing clip in a blaze of publicity. The scene is now set for the extraordinary thing that happened next. I have searched, and I can come up with nothing else like it in all the annals of American literature. Three big-name American novelists, heavy with age and literary prestige—John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving—rose up to denounce A Man in Full. Three famous old novelists rousing themselves from their niches in literary history to declare a particular new novel anathema—if anything even remotely comparable had ever occurred before, it had certainly escaped my attention.
  Frankly, I was amazed, not that the two of them didn't approve, but that at this stage of their lives they had taken the time. "My God, those two old piles of bones!" I said to the reporters who began clamoring for interviews. "They're my age!"
  I was sixty-eight. I knew how it must have drained them. How could they have spent those untold hours, ground out those thousands and thousands of words—the two old codgers had gone on for pages—pages!—to review a novel? How could our two senior citizens have found the energy in those exhausted carcasses of theirs? In interviews Updike was already complaining about his aging bladder. Mailer, I noticed, was appearing in newspaper photographs supporting himself with two canes, one for each rusted-out hip.
  The way John Irving, who was fifty-seven, joined his fellow oldsters in this obsession with A Man in Full did not involve such debilitating toil, but his emotional toll may have been even greater. Irving threw a temper tantrum on television.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Jimmy Lowe's panicked expression began to dissolve as the beauty of this strategy dawned on him, and he, too, grinned and said,"'At's a goddayum good idy! Gitcher tail up, gal, and let's go git it on!"
  Thus encouraged, Ziggefoos said, "And a pack a Salem One Hunnerts, too. We don't git many vis'tors fum New York daown here'ta DMZ. 'At's whirr you fum, ain't it? New York City?"
  Jimmy Lowe and Flory were doubled over with laughter. Irv began to despair. Mary Cary had confronted them, but they were turning it into a farce.
  But Mary Cary kept boring in on Jimmy Lowe. "You just described how you kicked down a door, flattened Randy Valentine against a wall, and began beating him."
  She wouldn't let up. She was staring him down. He was close enough to reach out and grab her by the throat.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last paragraph
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Several of these pieces originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The American Spectator, Esquire, Forbes ASAP, Harper's, New York, The New York Times Magazine, and The Tatler. "Ambush at Fort Bragg" first appeared in Rolling Stone.