cover image Bright Lights, Big Ass: A Self-Indulgent, Surly Ex-Sorority Girl's Guide to Why It Often Sucks in the City, or Who Are All These Idiots and Why Do They All Live Next Door to Me?

Bright Lights, Big Ass: A Self-Indulgent, Surly Ex-Sorority Girl's Guide to Why It Often Sucks in the City, or Who Are All These Idiots and Why Do They All Live Next Door to Me?

Jen Lancaster, . . NAL, $14 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-451-22125-4

Lancaster (Bitter Is the New Black ) is a plus-sized, downwardly mobile Republican. She makes fun of disabled people. She cracks nasty about Anna Nicole Smith (granted, she was still alive at the time). She annotates her text with footnotes cheering herself on. When she's feeling particularly mean, she writes in her own "pidgin Spanish." But in spite of all her politically incorrect rantings, there are times when Lancaster is just too on-target to ignore. People who worry about Bush imposing the Christian lifestyle on everyone, for instance, should take heart from how he's raised his daughters—those "twins are but a Jell-O shot away from starring in the presidential edition of Girls Gone Wild ." Even if readers can't altogether sympathize when Lancaster has to downscale her shopping "Holy Trinity" from Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus to IKEA, Target and Trader Joe's—they know what she means when she talks about the relentlessly cheerful sales staff at Trader Joe's, the tough-love staff at Target or how IKEA's going to take over America by keeping us all busy with Allen wrenches. Her humor is a bit like junk food—something you can enjoy when no one is looking. (May)