The Girl in the Book

Award-winning director Marya Cohn graduates from short films to her first feature-length work with this emotional drama of a woman overcoming a myriad of inner demons. Emily VanCamp stars as Alice, a junior editor at a Manhattan publishing company. Frustrated by the dead end nature of her job—her editor boss ignores her opinions—and a severe writer's block that has kept her from pursuing her own literary career, Alice is also burdened by a dreadful relationship with her overbearing father (Michael Cristofer), a famous retired literary agent. Things go from bad to worse when she is put in charge of the re-release of a novel from a writer (Michael Nyqvist) who seduced Alice when she was a teenager and turned the incident into a novel. The Girl in the Book is not short on emotional angst, although a thin side plot involving Alice's romantic flirtation with a handsome political activist seems to have been grafted on to offset the otherwise total dreariness. VanCamp does the best she can, but the material is often trite and the depiction of intellectual pomposity in the publishing world never truly feels genuine. Not a necessary purchase. (P. Hall)