Is There Still Sex in the City?
(Libby/OverDrive eBook, Kindle)

In the mid-1990s, Bushnell's Sex and the City newspaper column turned into the wildly popular cable series about thirtysomething Carrie Bradshaw (her alter ego) and her close friends. Bushnell continues to fictionalizes her experiences as Candace, a turning-60 divorcée, returns to the dating game, and shares her woes with her friends who are also navigating midlife challenges. Fortunately, Candace keeps her wits and her wit about her, playing with acronyms: IRL (in real life), MAM (middle-aged madness), MNB (my new boyfriend), and MNH (my new husband). There are some sad events (her dad's death and a suicide), but this is primarily a comedy. Her friends urge her to go on a date with Arnold, 75, telling her, You never know. Of course, the problem with you never know' is that so often you actually do know, she writes. After telling her she looks surprisingly young and spry for her age, Arnold also asserts that very young women who date older guys are essentially using sex to fuel an expensive-purse addiction. Bushnell is still plenty edgy, funny, and entertaining.--Karen Springen Copyright 2019 Booklist

In this novel, bestselling author Bushnell (Sex and the City) offers an up-close look at the sometimes steamy, sometimes sedentary sex lives of eligible older women navigating the dating market. Divorced and contentedly living alone, narrator Candace receives a call from famed magazine editor Tina Brown, who suggests she get back to dating­, and writing about it. Candace reluctantly agrees (sex--like "cleaning out the gutters"--has been neglected of late). With characteristic wit and piquant humor, Candace travels between her Upper East Side apartment and a small house in the Long Island Hamptons, where she is joined by a set of aging single girlfriends who are also scouting for sex and/or romance. Candace devotes a spicy chapter to "cubbing" (50-plus women dating men in their 20s), but she doesn't pursue this approach, warning that "cubs" may just be seeking free rent. She does, however, go out with a 31-year-old musician she finds on the dating app Tinder, and dines with a 75-year-old "senior-age player" (SAP), an older single man of means. Many middle-aged men, she observes, prefer dating much younger women, and finding an "age-appropriate" partner isn't simple (though not, she proves, impossible). Though it may take some effort both online and IRL, many older women, Bushnell's self-named character asserts, can date and mate with gusto. With its exploration of familiar themes of female friendship and the conundrums of male/female relationships, Bushnell's clever new work will be adored by fans of Sex and the City and its HBO and film spin-offs. (Aug.)

The further adventures of Candace and her man-eating friends.Bushnell (Killing Monica, 2015, etc.) has been mining the vein of gold she hit with Sex and the City (1996) in both adult and YA novels. The current volume, billed as fiction but calling its heroine Candace rather than Carrie, is a collection of commentaries and recounted hijinks (and lojinks) close in spirit to the original. The author tries Tinder on assignment for a magazine, explores "cubbing" (dating men in their 20s who prefer older women), investigates the "Mona Lisa" treatment (a laser makeover for the vagina), and documents the ravages of Middle Aged Madness (MAM, the female version of the midlife crisis) on her clique of friends, a couple of whom come to blows at a spa retreat. One of the problems of living in Madison World, as she calls her neighborhood in the city, is trying to stay out of the clutches of a group of Russians who are dead-set on selling her skin cream that costs $15,000. Another is that one inevitably becomes a schlepper, carrying one's entire life around in "handbags the size of burlap sacks and worn department store shopping bags and plastic grocery sacks....Your back ached and your feet hurt, but you just kept on schlepping, hoping for the day when something magical would happen and you wouldn't have to schlep no more." She finds some of that magic by living part-time in a country place she calls the Village (clearly the Hamptons), where several of her old group have retreated. There, in addition to cubs, they find SAPs, Senior Age Players, who are potential candidates for MNB, My New Boyfriend. Will Candace get one?Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sadi.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In the mid-1990s, Bushnell's "Sex and the City" newspaper column turned into the wildly popular cable series about thirtysomething Carrie Bradshaw (her alter ego) and her close friends. Bushnell continues to fictionalizes her experiences as Candace, a turning-60 divorcée, returns to the dating game, and shares her woes with her friends who are also navigating midlife challenges. Fortunately, Candace keeps her wits and her wit about her, playing with acronyms: IRL (in real life), MAM (middle-aged madness), MNB (my new boyfriend), and MNH (my new husband). There are some sad events (her dad's death and a suicide), but this is primarily a comedy. Her friends urge her to go on a date with Arnold, 75, telling her, You never know. "Of course, the problem with ‘you never know' is that so often you actually do know," she writes. After telling her she looks surprisingly "young and spry" for her age, Arnold also asserts that very young women who date older guys are essentially using sex to fuel an expensive-purse addiction. Bushnell is still plenty edgy, funny, and entertaining. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.

Bushnell extracts some gems from her "Sex and the City" column in the New York Observer, which has a devoted following. But will it play in Peoria? Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information.

"We're leading sensory saturated lives," announces jetsetting photographer and playboy Peter Beard in a roundtable discussion of menages a trois, setting the tone of opulent debasement that suffuses this collection of Bushnell's punchy, archly knowing and sharply observed sex columns from the New York Observer. Prowling the modish clubs, party circuit and weekend getaways of rich and trendy New York society (most of whose denizens are identified by pseudonyms), Bushnell offers a brash, radically unromantic perspective. She visits a sex club and dates a Bicycle Boy ("the literary romantic subspecies" whose patron saints are George Plimpton and Murray Kempton). But in most chapters she keeps to the sidelines, deploying instead her alter-ego Carrie (like the author, a blonde writer from Connecticut in her mid-30s), whose sweet if feckless romance with Mr. Big?a nondescript power player?serves as a foil for the hilarious, unsentimentalized misadventures of her peers. These include model-chasers like Barkley, 25, a painter with the face of a Botticelli angel whose parents pay for his SoHo junior loft, and Tom Peri, the "emotional Mayflower," who ferries newly dumped women to higher emotional ground and is then invariably dumped. The effect is that of an Armistead Maupin-like canvas tinged with a liberal smattering of Judith Krantz. Collected in one volume, Bushnell's characters grow generic, but in small doses these essays are brain candy that will appeal equally to urban romantics and anti-romantics. (Aug.) Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information.

In this novel, bestselling author Bushnell (Sex and the City) offers an up-close look at the sometimes steamy, sometimes sedentary sex lives of eligible older women navigating the dating market. Divorced and contentedly living alone, narrator Candace receives a call from famed magazine editor Tina Brown, who suggests she get back to dating­, and writing about it. Candace reluctantly agrees (sex—like "cleaning out the gutters"—has been neglected of late). With characteristic wit and piquant humor, Candace travels between her Upper East Side apartment and a small house in the Long Island Hamptons, where she is joined by a set of aging single girlfriends who are also scouting for sex and/or romance. Candace devotes a spicy chapter to "cubbing" (50-plus women dating men in their 20s), but she doesn't pursue this approach, warning that "cubs" may just be seeking free rent. She does, however, go out with a 31-year-old musician she finds on the dating app Tinder, and dines with a 75-year-old "senior-age player" (SAP), an older single man of means. Many middle-aged men, she observes, prefer dating much younger women, and finding an "age-appropriate" partner isn't simple (though not, she proves, impossible). Though it may take some effort both online and IRL, many older women, Bushnell's self-named character asserts, can date and mate with gusto. With its exploration of familiar themes of female friendship and the conundrums of male/female relationships, Bushnell's clever new work will be adored by fans of Sex and the City and its HBO and film spin-offs. (Aug.)