Author Description

Product Description Best friends Tracie and Jonny meet for coffee each Sunday night to discuss their forlorn love lives. Tracie loves boys with an affinity for leather jackets and poetry—classic bad boys who seem too good to be true (and usually are); Jonny falls for girls who never like him in that way…until Jonny convinces Tracie to teach him some tricks of the trade. After a wardrobe makeover, learning to return from a dinner date with another phone number scrawled on his hand, scope for women at the airport baggage claim, and always carry a motorcycle helmet (even though he doesn't ride a motorcycle), Jonny quickly becomes a successful heartbreaker. And Tracie discovers that she just might be head-over-heels in love with her best friend. But there are more than a few loose ends. Tracie's current bad boy has at last decided he wants to settle down, her girlfriend has the hots for Jonny, and Jonny can't understand why Tracie never liked him for who he was before the leather.With her inimitable wit, Olivia Goldsmith, bestselling author of The First Wives Club, delivers a smart, laugh-out-loud tale of modern romance sure to keep listeners everywhere in stitches. From Publishers Weekly For all its hip talk and flaunting of high-tech accessories, Goldsmith's (The First Wives Club) cream-puff new read is an old-fashioned tale of love and friendship. In the new SeattleDa town suddenly stinking rich, "famous for its bad boys, good coffee, and Micro Millionaires"DTracie Higgins is a young reporter for the Seattle Times. Though she has a musician-poet-lout boyfriend, every Sunday Tracie meets platonic chum Jonathan Delano for brunch. Jonathan is a techno-wizard for Micro/Con; he is responsible, dedicated, environmentally correct; good to his mother and stepmothers; and alas, an ugly duckling dweeb who hasn't had sex in a year. Tracie agrees to give him a "make over": the clothes, the moves, the haircut, the linesDin short, attitude. "Women don't want nice guys," she says. She should know. In fact, every man in the book (except Jon) is a selfish leech, abusive or indifferent. Every woman seems clueless. But the dialogue is crisp and funny, and though the characters are shallow, they're lively, comradely and comic. The makeover itself is wonderfully funny, especially as poor Jon remains pretty hapless on the pickup. Soon, however, his spiffy clothes, spiked hair, stale lines and casual cruelty turn his love life around. Has the loyal friend, the true lover, the decent, smart, stock-optioned man vanished into chic-ether? Read on. (Jan.)Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Tracie and Jonny are just buddies complaining to each other about their lousy love lives until Tracie decides to remake Jonny as a red-hot loverAand then falls for him.Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Olivia Goldsmith is the bestselling author of Pen Pals, Bad Boy, The First Wives Club, Flavor of the Month, The Bestseller, and Switcheroo. From Booklist Goldsmith delivers another pleasurable read. This time she uses the standard Pygmalion story line, but this isn't your usualMy Fair Lady. A woman, Tracie Higgins, is the teacher, while the pupil is her best male friend, Jon Della. Jon's problem is that he is too nice, too sweet, and too much of a "computer geek," making his romantic life nonexistent. Wanting to change his kindly ways, he enlists Tracie to transform him into the type of guy that women fall head over heels for--a "bad boy." Tracie can't help but fall for bad boys herself--her current boyfriend, Phil, is consistently unavailable and commitment-shy. Goldsmith's timing is right on: as Jon progresses from nerdy to knockout, the story becomes clever and more engaging. Although the plotline is familiar--the dynamics of the platonic teacher-student relationship change as the tutor, unprepared for the pupil's successful evolution, becomes jea