The Anxiety of Everyday Objects: A Novel

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Summary: The Beauty of the Anxiety of Everyday Objects
Review: Aurelie Sheehan is a magnificent storyteller and she writes like a dream. The Anxiety of Everyday Objects could be a bright, crisp read--a series of madcap adventures provides a smart page-turning pace--but I took my time. It's one of those books that packs sentence-by-sentence delights driven by a miraculous sense of language.

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Summary: Excellent tension: Interesting and Substantive
Review: This book is ambitious, and though it doesn't quite live up to its own expectations, it's a great read.

Both a character sketch and a workplace mystery, *Anxiety* reminds you how dangerous it can be to take people at face value. Manipulation and office politics are treated with gravity and wit. An excellent and impressive first novel. I will definitely buy Sheehan's next book.

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Summary: Couldn't put it down!
Review: Well-written, intriguing unraveling of the perfect legal secretary from Connecticut. Really good. I stayed up late reading it and I don't regret it. Now, that is a successful book IMHO!

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Summary: well-written, well-plotted -- exit dancing!
Review: Winona is a 29-year-old secretary in a NYC law firm, who takes pride in the fact that she can do the duties of her job so well. This pride in her work, coupled with her compassion for other people, makes her a poor fit in the law firm, but she is so winningly unassuming and knows how to work so well that what is best for her is never questioned, least of all by Winona herself.

Things seem to happen to Win, rather than she make things happen. She has dalliances with a few men (Jeremy, Sylvester, Rex) and forms a friendship with Sandy, a beautiful blind lawyer who joins the firm. Sandy treats Winona in such a way that she is almost wooing her. But more importantly she also encourages Win to pursue her dream of being a filmmaker (her screenplay in progress is called "The Anxiety of Everyday Objects).

The encouragement and friendship entangle Win in a situation where she has to start making decisions.

Win is affable and likable -- how could you NOT like a heroine who names her cat Fruit Bat? She wants to do what's right and be happy in a world where you often have to choose between the two and never win anyway.

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Summary: "One upon a time there was a blind girl; then she was gone"
Review: With an astute eye for office politics, and a knack for the metaphysical, Sheehan has written a beguiling and quite idiosyncratic story of what it takes to survive as a working girl in New York. The narrative offers us a savvy glimpse into the life of Winona Bartlett, a twenty-something filmmaker, who is passing the time, and paying rent, by working as a secretary in the swanky and ritzy Manhattan law firm of Greko Mauster Crill, Where she has, at least, "an identity, the sanctity of identity in her normal work." When Sandy Spires, a blind, ambitious and devastatingly beautiful lawyer joins the firm, Winona is inexplicably drawn to her. Sandy befriends Winona, promotes her to office manager, and showers her with attention and affection. But Sandy has a secret, and Winona through her own naïve ambition, is unwittingly drawn into Sandy's clandestine activities.

Out of the office, Winona has to suffer her flighty and self obsessed sister Liz, who is constantly asking her to house sit, "do her bidding," and look after her dog Sniffles. She is also shielding attention from Rex, a cute young hotshot lawyer, who wants to "date" her while coping with her current boyfriend Jeremy, who wants her to go to a couple's conference for counseling. After she decides to break up with Jeremy, Sylvester, a savvy, older continental filmmaker, courts her with the promise to help her break into the industry. The plot twists and turns and Winona finds herself getting caught up in all sorts of experiences as she searches for integrity and tries to navigate through the frustrations of life.

Winona's film is going to be called The Anxiety of Everyday Objects and she wants the heroine of her film to be going about her business, seeing things, but things that are "magnified, imagined, or skewed - an outburst of her own anxiety." Is there a difference between what you see and what you hear, or are they incomparable as "an aria to a sun collapsing over a French Hill?" How we perceive each other, and what we look for in a person's character is at the heart of this delectably lively and spirited novel. Perhaps in the end, it isn't absolutely clear whether it is sight or blindness that produces happiness. Fans of "chic lit" are going to appreciate this work, along with anyone who has ever found themselves in the middle of the manipulations, and scheming affairs of office life. Mike Leonard May 04.