Diana Peterfreund's "Secret Society Girl: An Ivy League Novel" is one of those books you love to hate. While fast-paced and fairly well-written, its facile premise seems annoyingly obvious: the mysterious Rose & Grave society invites Amy Haskel, Ivy League student at the fictional Eli University, to join its elite ranks. Peppering her descriptions with sometimes strained literary allusions, the author, who graduated from Yale in 2001, attempts to give her gossipy narrative an intellectual veneer.
Like many chick-lit heroines, Amy Haskel appears to be an idealized facsimile of the author. Smart, perky, and self-conscious?a la Bridget Jones?Amy Haskel edits her school's literary magazine and hopes to one day work in publishing.
Upon learning that she has been recruited for the elite Rose & Grace society instead of the more literary one she had expected, she does what any chick-lit heroine in her place would do: She vacillates, complains, and thinks only about how joining the society could harm her relationships with her friends.
The author's ubiquitous excuses for Amy's behavior (she was drunk, she had never wanted to join Rose & Grave in the first place, etc.) almost appear like Peterfruend is trying to defend her own actions. Amy's struggle to gain acceptance as one of the first female members of the society is similarly uninspiring. Like Elle Wood's animal rights crusade in "Legally Blonde 2," the heroine is given a cause that is virtually impossible to argue against.
Peterfreund's take on the more controversial issues of admission, privilege, and exclusion that arise within the novel is disappointingly ambiguous. Amy initially resents the influence that the society wields on the campus, disliking the privileged students who make up its ranks and laughing at the society's haughty and antiquated rituals. However, she eventually buys into the connections that the society gives her, only to become horrified when an alumnus, upset by her admission to Rose & Grave, takes away Amy's summer internship at a prestigious publishing firm.
Spending a summer without a brag-worthy internship is presented as a fate worse than death, which I guess tells you something about the students at Yale?excuse me?Eli University. But Peterfreund, content to focus on Amy's attempt to "save" her summer, fails to explore the negative implications of ambition and privilege. Yale's reaction to Peterfreund's presentation of its campus is similarly neutral; her book is simply listed in the Yale Alumni Magazine without comment.
A sequel, "Under the Rose," is set for release in June 2006. Let's hope by then Peterfreund realizes you need more than an Ivy League setting wrapped up in a girly pink cover to tell an engaging story.