BLAME IT ON EVE

"Men are a dime a dozen and I have five dollars," Shawni Kaye Baldwin brags to Ernie, her gay hairstylist and closest confidant, at the beginning of Boles's cliché-riddled debut. Newly engaged and pushing 30, she behaves exactly like the spoiled, empty-headed caricature she's so afraid of becoming ("I wonder if I look like a hoochie"), addicted to surface flash and material goods. The former model turns down a lucrative gig with a top designer, much to her mother's chagrin, to get engaged to Bo Delaney, a smooth entertainment attorney who keeps her decked out in designer clothes in an Upper East Side apartment and supplies her with a baby-blue Lexus. Shawni's brother, Duran, a music promoter, gets her a gig as stylist for a new hip-hop group, the Gentlemen. An encounter with one of the singers, Zin, makes her realize just how unfulfilled she feels being Bo's trophy wife–in–training. Confronting her mother during a failed attempt at making wedding plans, Shawni begins to understand the older woman's unhappiness and her own fear regarding a future that looks increasingly dubious when she begins to suspect Bo is seeing another woman. The swirling storms of discontent, self-questioning and clumsy attempts at self-realization—including a detox weekend at a retreat called Eternal Hope—are hard to take seriously amid the barrage of brand names and Buppie fabulousness, but Shawni does grow up a little by story's end. 3-city author tour. (Oct.)