to date or to anaesthetize and retrain

So, a friend (Nunzio, I'm beginning to doubt you, buddy), highly recommended this book to me by telling me that I reminded him of the heroine. He happened to be carrying the book with him at the time, and I was all flattered by the suggestive graphics on the cover. (See picture at left.)

Let's take a gander at the blurb on the back cover: "..Cassie doesn't have time to waste on men who don't meet her standards. So she has three handsome men with potential chained to cots in her basement... After lessons on color coordination, behavior on dates, and, occasionally, sex, her charges will eventually be loosed upon a city of grateful women... With an endearingly amoral heroine [emphasis mine] ...Cassandra French's Finishing School for Boys is a shockingly funny, original, dead-on satire of the dating game."

The author, Eric Garcia, does a fair job of taking chick lit and making it his own. Apparently, he has also written a bunch of mystery books where dinosaurs are still alive and among humans, but in disguise. Weird. He also wrote Matchstick Men.

Anyway. As most of you know, I do not have a basement, so there's no way I resemble the heroine. I live in a studio. There's barely enough room for my shoes. Now, I have definitely dated more than one guy that could have benefitted infinitely from a beating with a cat-o-nine-tails or morphine-induced karaoke lessons, but I really don't have the energy to go about retraining the many retardulous men running amok in the dating world. And, as previously stated, I do not have a basement.

On the other hand, I like the idea of this book being a sort of cautionary tale for the jerks of the world.