Rachel Johnson

The mating game in Manhattan

issue 01 May 2004

A publishing friend arrived with an armful of new books as a cadeau maison. I have to confess I picked up Plum Sykes’s Bergdorf Blondes with a groan, expecting it to be bad, on the grounds that the young author was thin, beautiful, had an irritating name and should therefore be doomed to fail.

A few minutes later I had decided that her sparkling effort represented an important milestone in the history of the genre of book best read as a teenager at boarding school under the duvet in the dorm, whilst pretending to Matron to be racked by terrible curse-pains.

It is a romantic rollercoaster starring a fashion moppet referred to merely as Moi (as in mwah mwah, not Daniel Arap), who is of Anglo-American heritage, and who works for a glossy in New York. So far, by the way, so Plum.

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