Rating: 
Summary: A wonderfully well-written romantic escape novel.
Review: A great escape novel that I was glad to have read after completing a rigorous and exhausting 3-month work assignment. I completely escaped reality! The book is engrossing. Initially, I was taken aback by the lusty and obscene language, but it certainly set the stage for the plot and characters development. Ms. Ciresi captured the essence and tradeoffs of life and all the issues and subissues intertwined therein. This includes: living in the city compared to the suburbs, the workplace job/career struggle, mother/daughter/sister ties, religious paradoxes, and most of all the complexities in making an unconventional male-female relationship work. Ms. Ciresi's subtle and not so subtle humor made me laugh out loud. I even had tears at times and found myself turning to my husband to tell him the "latest" Lisa event. It's definitely an adult-theme novel and not one for everyone. However, if you enjoy racy, funny books you will enjoy this one of a hardy young American woman (raised as an Italian Catholic) attemting to conquer her real and fictional demons.
Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic read!
Review: After all of the "chick lit" duds I have been reading lately, this is a breath of fresh air. I was so engrossed that I tried desperately to read it through in one sitting, but life would not allow me to, so it took me a couple of days.
I loved it. It's believeable, well written, and positively great! Lisa(r) is a strong character, and "watching" her grow up and learn to love was heartbreaking at times, and make me cheer for her at others.
Cheers to Rita Ciresi for writing such a great book about a young woman who finds herself, instead of a fairytale, in the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrible!
Review: I could barely finish this book! How others can state otherwise is beyond me. The book is extremely slow and the characters are so dull you hate them half way through the book. The cover is completely misleading giving the impression of a light hearted fun read as it states "Lisa's mother wants her to get married so badly that anyone in pants will do" doesnt make sense at all since there was no character development between Lisa and her mom. By the end of the book I was skipping pages to see how it would FINALLY end! Skip this book, its one pages too many and very boring!
Rating:
Summary: Distracting and delightful...
Review: I found Pink Slip to be a very enjoyable, engrossing read that was pretty well-written, interesting and had fairly well-developed characters. There's a lot of humor interspersed with some very perceptive exploration of the corporate climate, inter-office dating and family life.The novel revolves Lisa, an Italian American whose mother has certain expectations of her, ones that she doesn't necessarily want to fill - that her sister seems to have done what her mother wants complicates the picture. And then there's her cousin, her dear friend, who doesn't really fit into the family either because he's gay. With Lisa at the center and Dodie playing a significant role, the book explores Lisa's experience as she leaves New York City for a suburban corporation where she gets involved with a co-worker who also happens to be her superior. There's lots in the book that is funny, some that's sad and a lot that is touching. Lisa's relationship is far from perfect from the start yet the reader understands what draws her to this person, although on some levels I found her interactions with and relationship with her cousin more compelling. Many aspects of Lisa's life are explored in detail - sometimes a little overdone - there are others that are glossed over, which at times can be a little unsatisfying. On the whole, though, as light entertainment, I found Pink Slip to be a lot better than many books out there and would recommend it without hesitation to anyone looking for a fun, distracting read.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful! A "Chick Lit" book with meat
Review: I loved it -- from the cover it does seem to be a fluffy, "chick lit" book, and it is fun, but it also has a serious side. Lisa Diodetto (yes, it means "God said" in Italian, which is interesting given Lisa's moral dilemmas) is grappling with the issues a lot of young women deal with today..establishing a career, moving to a suburb from a city (or vice versa), finding a meaningful love interest after a string of meaningless ones, trying to deal with her mixed feelings toward her family, etc.
She has a wonderful, funny and close relationship with her gay cousin, which provides much of the comic relief and funny lines of the novel, but I particularly loved the whole exploration of the office romance...especially, one between a subordinate and boss. So what happens if two people in that situation really do fall in love (and it does happen quite often in the real world)?
I also especially enjoyed the parts about Lisa's dealings with her family, which are not ideal...I think many people can relate to the whole less-than-perfect family situation.
I agree with the reviewer who said the first 30 pages or so were slower, but it does get much more absorbing after that.
Thanks to Ms. Ciresi for writing such an entertaining and yes, thoughtful book for women both young and old. I hope she writes many more! I will buy any of them.
Julia Wilkinson, author, My Life at AOL and other books
Rating:
Summary: Ugh!
Review: I was extremely disappointed with this book. Not only did I find the characters completely unlikeable, but the situations they were involved in were also totally boring. I couldn't stand the main character and couldn't care less about what happened to her. This book dragged on forever and it wasn't worth finishing. Don't waste your time.
Rating:
Summary: a delightful read!
Review: I'm female graduate student in a physics-related subject. Unfortunately I am pretty disillusioned by men (seen too many weirdos in my field!) and also by most fiction written for women (too wordy and/or banal). However, I was so riveted by this wonderful book that I played hooky from the lab for an entire day to stay home and read it. I could write a lot about the quirky heroine and her sweetly irreverent cousin Dodie, but the book is worth reading mainly because of the character of Eben Strauss. He's definitely on the endangered species list - gentle, moral, considerate, loving as well as professionally successful. I am not ashamed to say that I was touched to the point of tears. (for the record, "The Bridges of Madison County" didn't have the same effect on me.) Although the author has drawn upon several stereotypes, the clever dialog paints the characters as eminently REAL, 3-D people. Hope to see more books by the author.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful !
Review: Like her other books Blue Italian,and Sometimes I Dream in Italian,Pink Slip starts by being a fun,light hearted story about the difficulties encountered by Italian girls who are still dominated by their families.Lise's mother is pushing her to marry and raise children and can't or won't grasp the fact that her daughter is a clever,educated woman who is holding down a well paid corporate job.Lise has compensated for the lack of love in her family by becoming,in her teens and early twenties,what used to be known as "the town bike",and in her early twenties,had an abortion because of her total disregard of precautions against pregnancy and transmitted sexual disease.The only member of her family that she truly loves is her gay cousin Dodie.Despite the seemingly light hearted telling of this story,there is a very dark undercurrent and I found myself crying at several points ( I'm NOT a book crier )Pink Slip really moved me and I'd certainly recommend it to those readers who enjoyed Ms.Ciresi's other books.
Rating: 
Summary: Book explores romance
Review: Six feet, 175 pounds of sexy, synthetic male flesh topped with glamorous red hair - the only man in Lisa's life is the one her mother bought her. In Rita Ciresi's Pink Slip, Lisa's mother tires of worrying about her single daughter and thus buys "Security Man," a convincing-looking blow-up doll, to ride in the front seat of Lisa's car, to ensure that no one will attack the seemingly solitary woman. "He looked just like Perry Como. I couldn't resist," says mom; Lisa decides to toss Red Rover (the dummy's) out onto the side of the highway. After a string of dead-end relationships and affairs, the only man who has any staying power in 25-year-old Lisa's life is her gay cousin, Dodie. After watching her cousin stride up the ladder of success on Wall Street and rack up one happy relationship after another, Lisa makes the move to the burbs to find her own money and love, in whichever order they happen upon her. As an editor at a medical company, Lisa finds herself surrounded by waspy, gossipy females and very few available men. Eventually, though, she finds romance with her boss, Strauss, a fellow Italian. The pair trade Italian names and attempt to one-up each other with mom stories. "My mother beats throw rugs - with a big wooden spoon - over the back porch railing to get the dust out." "My mother waxes the kitchen floor on her hands and knees." "Beats vacuuming the ceiling. Really. I kid you not. My mother vacuums the ceiling." Strauss and Lisa's office affair reads like a steamy harlequin romance novel, complete with the office security guard who discovers their relationship. Strauss and Lisa sneak out during lunch hour for a quickie at his house, only to find the cleaning lady. They end up taking a romantic stroll through the woods, tracking muddy prints all over the office upon their return. Dr. Peggy Shoenbarger, boss to both Lisa and Strauss, finds the muddy evidence - the standard chaos ensues. Ciresi keeps her readers' interest with the love story in Pink Slip, with the proper dash of sex scenes thrown in as added incentive. On the more serious side, Lisa's struggle with her mother and the constant memory of her deceased father are hauntingly believable. These family sentiments give the novel much of its charm. Glimpses into Lisa's Italian-Catholic family and Strauss' Italian-Jewish family give depth to the story, where there otherwise would be very little. A running subplot about Strauss' father's Holocaust experiences seems slightly out of place, but finally ties into the rest of the story in the last chapter. The main problem with Pink Slip involves Ciresi's bold attempts to flesh out her gay characters. She tries, but fails. Dodie struggles with his own identity during the AIDS scare of the '80s. Dr. Shoenbarger, meanwhile, is merely laughable as a stereotypical lesbian. Ironically, Lisa writes her own novel in Pink Slip - she admits her problem in character development is making her gay characters believable. Perhaps Ciresi realized her own weakness.
Rating: 
Summary: Pink Slip not worth the time
Review: The plot about Lisa and Strauss, her boss, is somewhat fun, but the way he's written I found him dull and unemotional. The rest of the plots aren't worth the time - why she is losing weight, the sexual energy with the brother-in-law, lashing out at her mother - except the relationship with her cousin, Dodie. It would have made for a much more succinct story to have the relationship with Lisa and Strauss be parallel to her relationship with Dodie. It was drawn out in many places and too in-depth about extraneous issues.
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