Janet Maslin of The New York Times is not loving Dog Days, the new first novel by Nebraskan Ana Marie Cox, better known as Wonkette, thanks to her political blog of that name.
Dog Days manages to be doubly conventional: it follows both an old-fashioned love-betrayal-redemption arc and the newer, bitchier nanny-Prada chick-lit motif. Melanie is a myopic and self-interested heroine by the standards of either genre.
Anyone expecting Dog Day to sound like Wonkette will wait a long time for any Wonkette wit to kick in.
Jessica Cutler, a woman who once worked on The Hill and gained fame via Wonkette’s reporting, also has a book out. The Washingtonienne is a fictionalized account of her real life sexual antics/conquests.
[UPDATE] As hard as this is to comprehend, Cox–who is without a doubt a media darling–now has a more complimentary second review in the Times, care of Christopher Buckley. Buckley says Dog Days is a “brisk, smart, smutty, knowing and very well-written first novel.”