Anyone sick of boilerplate like Citizen Girl, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’s unpalatable follow-up to The Nanny Diaries, will find fine and tonic relief in The Little White Car by Danuta de Rhodes (a.k.a. British novelist Dan Rhodes). Rhodes tracks his Parisian heroine, Veronique, through her stormy relationship with her baked slacker beau Jean-Pierre. Veronique is plunged into Lizzie Grubman–style tabloid notoriety when she plows her petite white Fiat into one of England’s most beloved celebrities. Rhodes takes the genre down with an admirably gentle touch. Still, it’s a shame that a genre that began life as satire should find itself so rapidly in need of satirizing.
The Little White Car, Canongate, September.