Julie's Review: Fitness Junkie

Author: Jo Piazza & Lucy Sykes
Series: None
Publication Date: July 11, 2017
Publisher: Doubleday
Pages: 304
Obtained: publisher via Netgalley
Genre:  Contemporary Fiction, Humor
Rating: 4/5
Bottom Line: A delightful, funny book about the fitness industry fads
Grab, Just get it at the library, or Remove from your TBR list? Grab

Summary: When Janey Sweet, CEO of a couture wedding dress company, is photographed in the front row of a fashion show eating a bruffin—the delicious lovechild of a brioche and a muffin—her best friend and business partner, Beau, gives her an ultimatum: Lose thirty pounds or lose your job. Sure, Janey has gained some weight since her divorce, and no, her beautifully cut trousers don't fit like they used to, so Janey throws herself headlong into the world of the fitness revolution, signing up for a shockingly expensive workout pass, baring it all for Free the Nipple yoga, sweating through boot camp classes run by Sri Lankan militants and spinning to the screams of a Lycra-clad instructor with rage issues. At a juice shop she meets Jacob, a cute young guy who takes her dumpster-diving outside Whole Foods on their first date. At a shaman's tea ceremony she meets Hugh, a silver fox who holds her hand through an ayahuasca hallucination And at a secret exercise studio Janey meets Sara Strong, the wildly popular workout guru whose special dance routine has starlets and wealthy women flocking to her for results that seem too good to be true. As Janey eschews delicious carbs, pays thousands of dollars to charlatans, and is harassed by her very own fitness bracelet, she can't help but wonder: Did she really need to lose weight in the first place? A hilarious send-up of the health and wellness industry, Fitness Junkie is a glorious romp through the absurd landscape of our weight-obsessed culture. ~Amazon.com

Review:  I'm not a fitness fanatic, okay I don't even really like working out because it feels like a chore, so the women in Fitness Junkie, who are obsessed with every trend, I don't get them. Seriously. I get the need to be healthy and well (I need to be better at it) but these women view it as their lives and in some ways a competition. Who's into the newest trend? Have you been invited to the super secret workout location? What about this diet and that, etc? To me, it seems like they are bored and trying to find ways of filling a void.

What Ms. Piazza and Ms. Sykes do well is satire of an industry that seems to be a bit full of itself. No one in the fitness/lifestyle world is without reproach. Their heroine, Janey, even begins to drink the kool-aid for a while until she drank too much of it. Janey's best friend, Beau, tells her that she needs to take a 3 month break from their successful business so that she can lose 30 lbs she's put on. She's the face of the business and well she can't be seen as she is currently. So she turns to her best gal pal, CJ, who is always on the up and up on the lastest fitness routine and dietary restrictions.

Of course, the novel isn't just about fitness, but it's about Janey's journey into figuring out what it is that she wants to do for the rest of her life and if some friendships really do have an expiration date. I loved Janey and wanted her to go after Beau in the worst way but in the end I think she got him where it really counted and when it counted.

For those that love a book with a sense of humor and purpose, then Fitness Junkie is for you.





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Julie's Review: The Knockoff

Author: Lucy Sykes & Jo Piazza
Series: None
Publication Date: May 19, 2015
Publisher: Doubleday
Pages: 352
Obtained: purchased
Genre:  Contemporary Fiction
Rating: 5/5
Bottom Line: Delicious and engaging
Grab, Just get it at the library, or Remove from your TBR list? Grab!

Summary: An outrageously stylish, wickedly funny novel of fashion in the digital age, The Knockoff is the story of Imogen Tate, editor in chief of Glossy magazine, who finds her twentysomething former assistant Eve Morton plotting to knock Imogen off her pedestal, take over her job, and reduce the magazine, famous for its lavish 768-page September issue, into an app. When Imogen returns to work at Glossy after six months away, she can barely recognize her own magazine. Eve, fresh out of Harvard Business School, has fired “the gray hairs,” put the managing editor in a supply closet, stopped using the landlines, and hired a bevy of manicured and questionably attired underlings who text and tweet their way through meetings. Imogen, darling of the fashion world, may have Alexander Wang and Diane von Furstenberg on speed dial, but she can’t tell Facebook from Foursquare and once got her iPhone stuck in Japanese for two days. Under Eve’s reign, Glossy is rapidly becoming a digital sweatshop—hackathons rage all night, girls who sleep get fired, and “fun” means mandatory, company-wide coordinated dances to Beyoncé. Wildly out of her depth, Imogen faces a choice—pack up her Smythson notebooks and quit, or channel her inner geek and take on Eve to save both the magazine and her career. A glittering, uproarious, sharply drawn story filled with thinly veiled fashion personalities, The Knockoff is an insider’s look at the ever-changing world of fashion and a fabulous romp for our Internet-addicted age. ~amazon.com

Review: The Knockoff is a book that I loved every single word of and every single minute I spent reading it. Perhaps it's where I'm at in my career or my profession (HR) but the insight into millennial is priceless. The Knockoff is what might happen if Andi came back to bump Miranda from her perch in The Devil Wears Prada. Although Imogen is no Miranda and Andi was no Eve. While it might be similar to The Devil Wears Prada it really is in a league of it's own. It's smart, witty, engaging and insightful. I'm not into fashion, I'm more into comfortable then trendy and being a fashionista but maybe that's why I enjoy being in a world of which I'm not privy too and learning something.

Instantly, this reader loved Imogen. She's ready to come back to work from a sabbatical and taken on the world of Glossy again but to her surprise it's no longer going to be a print magazine but an online app. Now Imogen knows what an app is but how the behind the scenes works, she's clueless. Enter, Eve Morton, who is what Imogen is not: young, tech savvy and a bitch. Yup, I said it, she's a bitch. And if he were a man, I would call him a douche-bag. She's too cutthroat and backstabbing to say she's just ambitious. You can be ambitious and successful without being any of those things.

While Imogen changes her feelings about technology and starts to understand how to work in this new world, she begins to cultivate her own ideas on how to integrate technology into her fashion world. It's not that she's against moving to a different platform, she just doesn't like Eve's approach to it.

As for Eve well she's so tunnel vision that she can't see anything else. She can't see that even in this tech-based world we live on, you do need to work on personal relationships. Although, that doesn't mean invading some one's personal space.

My good friend, Michelle said in her review that's it's an "us vs. them"  situation and that might be true but I'm not sure of any millennial who would be on Eve's side. She's just perfectly awful. There are some wonderful, hardworking, genuine people in this book. I love Ashley and think she was the perfect person to lend Imogen a hand into figure out the new world of Glossy.com and Eve. She was smart and savvy in ways I really didn't expect her to be.

I really can't say much else other than you need to read this no matter what "generation" you are in. Each of us will find something to identify with and scoff at. I will admit there was some social media references in there that I had no clue what they were and I'm OK with it, until my kids want to use it.

I'm so glad that The Knockoff lived up to and exceed the hype for me. Trust me, you won't want to put it down. 

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