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I played around in MySpace this week. Changed the look of my MySpace page and generally updated all the information. While nosing around, I found a few books of interest. The authors of this week’s books come from legal backgrounds. Now they’re writing. I appreciate career change.

First up is Chambermaid by Saira Rao

The synopsis on the author’s website goes like this:

The devil holds a gavel in this wickedly entertaining debut novel about a young attorney’s eventful year clerking for a federal judge. Sheila Raj is a recent graduate of a top-ten law school with dreams of working for the ACLU. When she lands a coveted yearlong federal clerkship with legal goddess Judge Helga Friedman, she cannot help but think that her life is destined for jurisprudential greatness.

But law school did not prepare Sheila for the power-hungry sociopath who greets her on her first day and insists that she is Pakistani (she’s Indian), that her name is Sheba (it’s Sheila), and refers to her co-clerk Laura as “the gay”; nor for Her Honor’s secretaries—Roy, who moonlights as a medieval bard called Felemid McDowell, and Janet, who pets the Pound Puppies draped over her computer when she’s not thumping her Bible. Only when she is assigned to a high-profile death-penalty case does Sheila realize she has to survive the year as Friedman’s chambermaid—not only her sanity, but actual lives hang in the balance.

Next is Ivy Briefs by Martha Kimes.

Publishers Weekly says this:

First time author Kimes is entertaining and funny in recounting her three years at one of the country’s premier law schools. A smart young woman with a good, but not always engaged, sense of perspective, Kimes jumps from the University of Wisconsin to Columbia Law School on the wings of a spectacular showing on the LSATs. Once there, she faces the predictable sadistic professor, hypercompetitive fellow students and, of course, rampant elitism. Kimes is happy to treat with an equal measure of humor the highly stylized courting dance between summer law clerks and mega law firms, as well as the foreboding horrors of the bar exam. Though some stories seem hyperbolic and re-created conversations can be suspiciously pat, Kimes captures with accuracy the gestalt of the law school experience. Kimes did get a job at what she calls “Lavish Law Firm.” But she eventually left to join the Make-a-Wish Foundation, which may be her final comment on the world of big-time law. The self-deprecating wit, catty observations and healthy sense of the absurd with which Kimes describes her approach-avoidance reactions to the world of law school raise the book above the ordinary.

The first is fiction (I hope) and the second nonfiction, but both sound interesting. Any thoughts?

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 11:07 am and is filed under About Authors, About Books, About MySpace Discoveries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.