Recommend-A-Book-Wednesday

I've spent the last few blogs emphasizing how important it is for readers to recommend books they like to friends. Now the time has come for me to practice what I preach. I'm always talking to my family and personal friends about books I like but I think I'm going to spend more time talking to you about it. I'm making Wednesdays Recommend-A-Book Day. I'll try to focus on authors who you may not have heard of since I don't think Dan Brown really needs a plug. Once I've posted my recommendation here I'll go over to Amazon and other bookseller websites and write a review. To be honest, I don't do that enough but if I'm going to ask it of you...well, I refuse to be a hypocrite.

So let's start with Marla Martenson's Diary Of A Beverly Hills Matchmaker. It's nonfiction and it's kinda shocking. The book details Marla's experiences when she was a matchmaker for some of the richest men in the world. The cost of her services ranged between $20,000 and $50,000. The agency's price was dependent on how unreasonable the man's demands were. To quote Marla: "If a guy looks like Danny DeVito and he wants to date someone who looks like Heidi Klum that's going to cost him a little extra." And you will not believe how many Danny DeVito types expect to date Heidi Klum lookalikes! In fact the demands of some of her clients are so unreasonable I actually had to email Marla just to check to make sure all this stuff was true. Men who want a super-model-gorgeous woman (they call them 10-pluses) who are 20 years younger than them, ivy league educated and want to play the role of a 1950s housewife. How many ivy league educated women do you know who want to play that role? Or how about the guy who decided to ditch on of his matches because although she was beautiful and perfect in almost every way he didn't like the way her nipples looked. Apparently her areolas were too big. And then there's the female client who appears to be willing to sleep with any man who buys her a $1000+ handbag. Not all of the clients at the dating service are this dysfunctional but almost all of them are...shall we say, eccentric? Marla on the other hand is this totally normal, likable and perhaps most importantly, relatable person and watching her navigate her way through a sea of egos and excessive materialism is sort of surreal. And lets not forget the decent people who happen into her matchmaking service. Reading their emails (and this book is filled with the real emails of her clients) as they delicately try to tell Marla that the man or woman they went on their last date with was insane is more than a little amusing. Considering how specific some of these people's checklists are it's amazing that Marla is able to make any matches at all. But she does. Again and again she finds a way to bring people who were clearly made for one another together.

It's sort of the Nanny Diaries of the dating world. And the weird thing is that shortly after I read this book a guy who could easily have been one of her clients asked me out. I sat across from him listening to him talk to me about his plans to broker this or that deal or start up some multi-billion dollar hedge fund and I found myself CONSTANTLY comparing him to the men I had just read about. I thought about what Marla would tell me I should expect and what I should see as a warning sign. In a pretty short period of time I realized that this was not a man I could ever trust and he wasn't treating me with the respect or consideration that Marla's male clients treated the purse-hooker. I think I should at least be treated as well as a purse-hooker. So I suppose the book was educational too.

Anyway, I definitely recommend Diary Of A Beverly Hills Matchmaker. You can order it through Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You're sure to find it entertaining and you just might learn something.


Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order Vows, Vendettas & A Little Black Dress today!