Book Review: The Publicist by Christina George

I received a copy of The Publicist by Christina George in exchange for an honest review.

Summary:

Can one woman change an age-old institution like publishing? Probably not, but Kate Mitchell sure wants to try. As a publicist with a large, respected New York publishing house, Kate finds herself at the mercy of a broken publishing system, books that don’t sell, and author egos that are often, well, as big as the island of Manhattan.

Enter the star editor, MacDermott Ellis: Tall, handsome, charismatic, married, and ready to save the day. Then there’s Allan Lavigne, once a revered author—now as forgotten as last year’s bestsellers and his nephew Nick: Tall, gorgeous, sweet, single, and ready to sweep Kate off her feet. Kate wants to do the right thing but her hormones seem to be driving her decisions.

As Kate tries to navigate the landmine of publicity, over-the-top author expectations, and the careful dance of “I’m sorry, your book isn’t on the bestseller list this week,” she also finds authors who are painfully overlooked by a publisher wanting more sex, more celebrities, and more scandal.

Welcome to the world of publishing. The ego has landed.

Review:

I’m having a bit of a struggle writing this review. I was of course looking forward to reading about the behind the scenes of a publishing house, and those parts of the story did intrigue me. There is a love triangle going on which was interesting as well, and a few sub-plots that kept the story moving along. The first half of the book I highly enjoyed but the second part…It seemed to me like someone got bored with the story and just rushed it. There were little snippets here and there and some stories ended abruptly and some characters came in that didn’t really need to be there. Getting back to the love triangle, the second romance started and possibly ended so quickly that I wasn’t entirely sure what happened. The editing also took quite a nosedive in the second half of the book. The story ends on a cliffhanger and I do have the second book coming up on my shelf so I’ll be curious to see how that pans out.

3 stars