** spoiler alert ** This book could not be more pretentious. By the time I was finished with it, my brain felt like mud, which is exactly what it felt like to read - trudging through mud.

The characters...sheesh, the characters. There's not one single redeeming quality among them. All of them are so self-absorbed, so blind to each other, so completely in love with his or herself that after awhile you begin to wonder what the point is of reading this book. I kept trying to figure out who the emperor was, then I ...more This book could not be more pretentious. By the time I was finished with it, my brain felt like mud, which is exactly what it felt like to read - trudging through mud.

The characters...sheesh, the characters. There's not one single redeeming quality among them. All of them are so self-absorbed, so blind to each other, so completely in love with his or herself that after awhile you begin to wonder what the point is of reading this book. I kept trying to figure out who the emperor was, then I realized that they are all followers. None of them has the sense to realize that whoever it is that they are following that day - that's the emporer that is running around naked and they have chosen to not wear his or her clothes too.

But that's just semantics. Is that what we're supposed to take from this book? That many of us are all followers tripping along doing whatever anyone tells us to do? That's a pretty pretentious statement from the author. Then again, after you've read the fifth sentence in the book and it's the fifth time that you're being smacked by parentheses, commas, semi colons, colons, more paretheses, sentences within sentences! Oy vey!

The characters are not well defined. Maybe the fact that they are all severely flawed should be a good thing, makes them more human. But at the same time... Marina is a 2D charicature of Paris Hilton. Danielle is a stuck up, pretentious, know it all. Murray is a combination of Oprah, Barbara Walters, Larry King and Dan Rather - just telling the people what they want to hear without an original thought to his brain. Julius is every gay man written by a New York socialite "author". Silly, flamboyant, teetering on the verge of joblessness, and a prostitute/coke fiend. (A good deal of the gay men I know are nothing like this. Maybe it's a New York Gay Man thing, I don't know.)

The only interesting character is "Bootie", the Thwaite's nephew. But quickly I became rather bored of his entitlement issues, his holier than thou/smarter than everyone attitude and lazy ways. Yes, no one wants to have to work but no one wants a fat ass taking up their time and space as well. I had high hopes for his character but he turned out just like everyone else - a disappointment.

I was honestly angry and disappointed when I got done reading this book. I thought, "hey, finally someone is writing a book about people like me searching for their life's ambition and purpose." Could not be farther from the truth! It's almost as if the author was completely out of touch with her audience, unless her audience was Paris and Nicole wannabes.