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Overview
On the surface, Cassandra French is living the typical LA lifestyle. A lawyer at a film studio, she spends her days bored by the tedium of the Business Affairs department, and her evenings either dating a string of useless men or meeting up with her girlfriends to bemoan the uselessness of said men. But luckily none of this matters, because Cassandra French has a vocation. Cassandra is a woman on a mission. And her mission is to reform men. Because how is it that she’s got such great girlfriends but never meets a man worthy of them? How is it that a man can have no conversation, no manners and no fashion sense...and yet he gets his pick of beautiful women? Something has to be done.
And so, in her basement, she’s set up her own Finishing School for Boys. There, men learn to dress well, to date well, to compliment a woman, to make great dinner conversation, and to leave behind all the arrogance, brutishness and idiocy that society has bred into them. It’s all going brilliantly—her students are happy, Cassandra’s succeeding at something she believes in passionately—until she enrolls Jason Kelly, the studio’s biggest star. And suddenly Cassie’s in over her head...
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060781316 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2017 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.76(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cassandra French's Finishing School for Boys
By Garcia, Eric
ReganBooks
ISBN: 0060730315Lesson no. 1
Stark and
Unrelenting Candor
There was a woman on television the other day who insisted that the best way for us, as humans, to achieve our goals is to grade ourselves, in every aspect of our lives, with stark and unrelenting candor. It's not good enough simply to think about these grades, or to tell them to a friend; according to this woman, who may or may not have been an actual doctor, you've got to write them down at least once a day if you want to make a difference in your life. There's no need, she said, to make any specific proactive plans for these changes to occur. The sheer act of writing them down is, eventually, enough to do the trick. Though I have a strong feeling the woman was a shill for the Bic pen corporation, it's difficult for me to resist what seems like a ridiculously easy method to turn my life toward the better. If all it takes to achieve happiness is a belly flop into the culture of constant self-evaluation, I'm ready to pull on a bikini and call myself a swimmer. To start, I'll give myself a C in metaphor.
GRADES FOR CASSANDRA FRENCH,
AGE LATE TWENTIES
(the very latest of the twenties, technically):
Personality: A+, cheery and bright (on a good day); B, moody and pensive (on a low-blood-sugar day); C, morose and sullen (those days when I can't be bothered to strike up the grimace that would net me a B).
Looks: B+, though I hear big hair is coming back into vogue, and I was damned cute in the late eighties, so it may be upgraded to an A- in a short while.
Physical health: A when my mother asks me, B when my friends ask me, C when I'm alone at home, excusing myself from the gym, picking out caramel See's candies to accompany me on lonely video-rental evenings. I guess that's closer to a C-, if we're going for that stark candor stuff.
Mental health: A when my mother asks me, B when my friends ask me, C when I'm alone at home, bloated on aforementioned See's candies and crying from the manipulative movie I rented that's set me back three years in therapy.
Career: This needs to be separated into two sections. Compensation is excellent, A+ all around. I make way more money than should be allowed by law. But in terms of job satisfaction, I'm hovering down near the remedial kids. It might be different if I even had work with which to be unsatisfied. Today, unfortunately, is a day like any other. Today, I have no work to do. Grade: D- with a see me after class.
Relationships: Incomplete. Course repeatedly dropped.
There. I feel better already.
In the dark ages before I discovered the joys of working for business affairs here at the studio (said joys: home before six P.M., great clam chowder at the commissary, free admission for myself and six friends to the studio-owned theme park), I put in my time at one of the big Century City law firms catering to the wealthy creative types in town who make and break films and television shows based on their horoscope and mood du jour. The firm had twelve partners, sixteen overzealous associates, and yours truly. That's twenty-eight attorneys eager to litigate tooth and nail over percentages of percentages of profits that would never materialize, and one Cassandra French, who found herself yawning through every deposition. Like an atheist who'd accidentally wandered into a southern Baptist holy-roller convention, I clapped along to the beat but just couldn't see what all the fuss was about.
As in most law firms across America, the partners at Kornfeld, Jannollari, and Winston expected me to account for my time in billable hours, a term derived from the German word billinbehoren, meaning roughly "slow death under fluorescent lights." Every billable hour can, in turn, be broken down into ten separate parts (a tenth of an hour, five-tenths of an hour, and so on) which means that my days stuttered by in very small chunks. In the legal world, nothing lasts shorter than six minutes. It's like an electron, unbreakable and unmutable. If you sneeze, that sneeze, technically, takes six minutes to complete itself. On the up side, it makes for fabulous orgasms.
A typical day at Kornfeld would find me running after three cases at once, trying to complete my tasks while still accounting for every minuscule bit of my day. Let's say, for example, that I'd been assigned the task to run down case law involving practical residuals for a U.S. syndicated television show sold to Croatian markets (yes, this is the kind of thing I did for a living; feel free to point and laugh at will). This necessitated a staggering amount of legwork, only a fraction of which could be legitimately accounted for. To wit: Everything in boldface below was considered billable by the firm; that is, they could turn around and charge this time to the client. Everything not in boldface was officially considered a "personal matter."
Continues...
Excerpted from Cassandra French's Finishing School for Boys by Garcia, Eric Excerpted by permission.
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