Friday, October 16, 2009
Friday Flashback
From June 2003:
Coffee and Kung Fu by Karen Brichoux. Chick lit.
Categories: Flashback, Books, ChickLit
Coffee and Kung Fu by Karen Brichoux. Chick lit.
The cover of this book say it's a debut novel. So I thought I'd read it with a kind eye. I didn't have to. In fact, I had to force myself to put it down a couple of times.You can read the entire thread, including a conversation with the author, here.
And now I'm not quite sure what to say--so many things are going on in this book.
Nicci seems to be like any other 20-something single, dealing with work, dating, and family. And like others, she's not quite satisfied. Through the events in the book, she begins to realize who she is and what she wants out of life.
It sounds pretty ordinary, describing the plot like that. But what makes Coffee and Kung Fu special is the characters. Nicci, of course, with her habit of judging dates by the type of movie they like, but also the large cast of secondary characters, from her friend Carol to the mysterious guy at the coffee shop. They're all very vivid and three-dimensional.
I enjoyed the snippets from Jackie Chan movies that Nicci uses to illustrate greater truths. I'm really feeling the urge to watch some Jackie Chan movies.
Coffee and Kung Fu is a perfect title for this book, even though Nicci doesn't drink coffee. The coffee shop and kung fu movies are the two things Nicci can count on while everything else is crashing in on her.
Categories: Flashback, Books, ChickLit
Labels: books, ChickLit, flashback
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Help Wanted, Desperately
**** Help Wanted, Desperately by Ariel Horn. chick lit.
Alexa Hoffman is a college senior with no idea what she wants to do after graduation--other than get a job in New York City so that she can stay with her boyfriend Jared. Unlike certain other people (ahem!), she starts actively looking and counting down the days with over six months left to go.
Making it even more imperative that she find a job, she's signed up to go teach English in Majuro, a third-world country, for a year, starting immediately after graduation. If she doesn't have a job, she won't have an excuse not to go.
So Alexa applies for job after job, each one more unlikely than the last: deodorant sniffer, earthworm breeder, model scout--you name it, she applies for it.
It's a cute story, though being on the other side of the generational gap made me a bit less sympathetic toward Alexa than I might have been. In particular, I didn't find her resume-padding and outright lying amusing. But she's young, and she does learn from her mistakes, writing down her lessons learned in a Bridget-Jones-ish section of each chapter.
What really redeemed the story for me is that Alexa does change and grow through the story--a pleasant surprise, as her character at the beginning of the book was fairly standard for chick lit: self-centered and focused on her goal. The fact that she developed into more than that; that the story wasn't just about her escapades but actually had some heart, made it definitely worth reading.
Help Wanted, Desperately was the result of one of my forays into Amazon's bargain bin in search of new authors, and one of the successes. I think I'll pass it on to Dagny (ahem), though I suspect she'll be hesitant to read it, thinking I'm nagging (which I am, but on the off chance that it'll help....).
Categories: Books, 4stars, ChickLit
Labels: 4 stars, books, ChickLit
Friday, March 07, 2008
The Accidental Diva
****½ The Accidental Diva by Tia Williams. Chick lit.
This book is the result of one of my forays into Amazon's bargain bin searching for new-to-me authors. Wonderful surprises like this are what keep me going back for more.
Billie Burke is a beauty editor for a hot fashion magazine, and she's been totally focused on her career until she meets Jay Lane, street hustler turned writer, and falls in love.
Sounds like a hundred other chick lit books, right? And that's pretty much what I expected when I started reading--there was a lot of fashion name-dropping, all of which went right over my head because you know I couldn't give a rat's ass (which raises the question: why the heck do I like chick lit so much, then?).
But then I started to get to know these characters and it became not just another chick lit book, but a story about real characters that I cared about and wanted to spend time with.
It's a classic case of lovers from opposite backgrounds, and the whole conflict is personified by Pandora. Pandora is a friend of Jay's from his youth, who's her own success story--she's an up-and-coming hairdresser, and she's been carrying a torch for Jay for years. She meets Billie and they become friends, and tells Billie about the guy she's in love with. Jay, however, doesn't know any of that--typical guy-like, he thinks they're just good friends. He also doesn't tell Billie he knows Pandora because he's trying to keep her away from his past.
How the three of them deal with the situation, their various relationships, and how they grow and change as a result--that's what made this a wonderful read.
Categories: Books, 4.5stars, ChickLit
Labels: 4.5 stars, books, ChickLit
Saturday, January 12, 2008
The Diva's Guide to Selling Your Soul
***½ The Diva's Guide to Selling Your Soul by Kathleen O'Reilly. Paranormal chick lit.
This is the story of V, who's sold her soul to the devil and is now thin, gorgeous, and successful. But selling your soul doesn't just come with benefits--it's also a pyramid scheme, and in order to get more powers, you have to recruit more souls, and V is starting to have second thoughts. And of course there's a guy involved.
It's a story with huge promise, but for me, it just didn't live up to it. What there was of the story was witty and clever, but I wanted more. For one thing, I wanted to know more about the negative consequences of not having a soul. And I'd have liked to learn more about the levels. Too, it seemed as though the devil was just giving and taking away levels almost at random, and while that could very well be consistent with the devil's personality, I want to see that.
Basically, I'd have liked an extra 50 pages or so of explanations and motivations and thoughts, or for those that are there to be more in depth. It's a story with depth that's told on the surface, and as such, it's a fun fast read, but I find myself a bit frustrated because it could have been so much more.
Categories: Books, 3.5stars, ChickLit
Labels: 3.5 stars, books, ChickLit
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Confessions of a Shopaholic
**½ Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. Chick lit.
You know, I really should have known from the title that this wasn't the book for me. In the immortal words of Eve Dallas, "I don't shop; I buy. There's a difference." But I enjoy chick lit, and I've liked other characters who aren't like me, and everybody loves these books (4.5 stars at Amazon with over 800 reviews), so when I was shopping at half.com, looking through the seller's other books to see if there were any I'd like so I could get the cheaper shipping (something the heroine of this book would never do), and saw a whole bunch of these (3 or 4) for 75 cents each, I decided to give them a shot.
Rebecca Bloomwood is, as the title states, a shopaholic. She's also a financial writer, though she mostly fakes her way through her job. She's deeply in debt. Mostly, she's a pathological liar. She hides her bills and apparently believes that if she never opens them, she's not liable for them. She convinces herself that she's actually saving money by buying an expensive scarf that's on sale. She stiffs her best friend and roommate on the rent and her share of expenses, but goes out and buys frivolous things on credit anyway. She buys a lottery ticket and is absolutely certain that she's now a millionaire--to the point where she's devastated when it doesn't win, and is sure it must be a mistake.
She decides that the way to get out of debt isn't to spend less; it's to earn more. So she goes about trying to accomplish that by even more lying. And in the end, she succeeds--gets a great job and gets the guy. This isn't a spoiler--you knew it would have a happy ending.
What is a spoiler, but a worthwhile one, if it keeps others from being as disillusioned as I was, is that Becky never learns a damned thing in the book. I'm not at all trying to convince anyone not to read this--obviously it doesn't bother the vast majority of readers--but since expectations have so much to do with one's enjoyment of a book, you should know not to expect Becky to grow or change.
So there are two reasons I didn't like this book:
- I couldn't sympathize with the main character at all, or even understand her. I've been in debt before--who hasn't? And I've bought things I couldn't afford. But the incessant lying and complete disregard for anyone besides herself made her utterly unlikeable from my perspective. She didn't have any redeeming qualities that I could see. You know, I like stories with characters who start out as unlikeable, then grow and change and develop into someone I can like. But she doesn't. Which leads me to:
- The structure of the story. It's about a static character. Things happen to her, and she reacts to them. More things happen. She reacts some more. Her problems get solved, but not by her own efforts, rather in spite of them. There's no conflict, no value change, no antagonist. A maxed-out Visa card is not an antagonist.
...more
Categories: Books, 2.5stars, ChickLit
Labels: 2.5 stars, books, ChickLit
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Card Sharks
*** Card Sharks by Liz Maverick. Chick lit.
I got this after enjoying What a Girl Wants and Adventures of an Ice Princess.
Best friends Marianne and Bijoux are looking for something more. Ex-heiress Bijoux wants a man who'll keep her in the style to which she used to be accustomed, and Marianne wants to find someone permanent and to quit falling back on longtime friend and sometime lover Donny.
When they ask where all the men are, it comes to them: they're playing poker. So Marianne and Bijoux decide to learn to play poker to meet men. Only it turns out that Marianne is very, very good at it. So good, that she ends up in Vegas at the World Series of Poker, accompanied by Bijoux, Danny, and Bijoux's reporter friend Peter.
The romance in this story (no, I'm not going to tell you who ends up together) was sweet, if tepid. The poker started out mildly interesting, but got boring in a hurry. I think I'd have liked this story more if I cared at all about poker. The tournament itself was a little fun, but I kept thinking of the tournament in Maverick, and this one was just not quite as exciting. (not fair, I know--Marianne can't compete with the sparks flying between Mel Gibson & Jodie Foster)
Mostly, I think it's just that other than a slight detour on the road to love, there wasn't any big change in Marianne. Sure, she learns she's good at poker, but that's not the only thing she's ever been good at--it's not like discovering a talent gave her faith in herself that she'd been lacking before. And that character growth is what I tend to look for in chick lit. The friends started out the book bored, and unfortunately, it proved to be contagious.
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Categories: Books, 3stars, ChickLit
Labels: 3 stars, books, ChickLit
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
My Favorite Mistake
**** My Favorite Mistake by Beth Kendrick. Chick lit.
I was familiar with Beth Kendrick's name from the (sadly, now defunct) Literary Chicks blog, so when I ran across this book in the discount section, I took it as a sign that I should give her a try.
Faith's used to stepping in whenever her little sister needs help, but after she co-signed the mortgage for Skye's bar, she thought she could pursue her own life as a globetrotting culinary writer. So when Skye calls her in Italy, in tears because her second husband has run off with another woman, Faith offers sympathy, but doesn't plan on coming back to Minnesota to hold her hand this time.
Then she gets a call from Flynn, her ex. Skye's not just broken-hearted. She's also pregnant, and the bar (with all of Faith's savings invested in it) is on the verge of bankruptcy. Faith makes the trip. Only to find that she's not a one-half owner of the bar--she's a one-third owner, Flynn being the other partner.
Ten years ago, Flynn had given Faith an ultimatum: marriage or nothing. She picked "nothing" and ran off to Los Angeles with a bass player. They've never talked about it, and now they have to work together to save the bar.
I always enjoy reunion stories, and that was fun, with a nice balance between comedy and romance. They'd both obviously gone on with their lives, but they'd also both never gotten over each other. Their dancing around the subject, trying to avoid the hurt and anger and attraction between them, was realistic and compelling. If it had been a romance, rather than chick lit, I'd have wanted to see more of what they saw in each other. But that's not what the book was about, so I accepted it as given.
It was about.... well, "if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with!" pretty much sums it up. Faith's made a life for herself, but she doesn't realize how much she needs home--both the good and the bad of it--until she comes back.
It was the secondary things that bugged me--Skye in particular. She's basically a ditzy bimbo. By the time Faith gets there, she's forgotten about her husband, and is blithely trying to pick up other men. The bar is her livelihood, but she's completely clueless and unconcerned about it, except for coming up with a ridiculous (and potentially dangerous) contest. And Faith enables, practically encourages her irresponsibility.
...more
Categories: Books, 4stars, ChickLit
Labels: 4 stars, books, ChickLit
Monday, October 01, 2007
Mr. Maybe
****½ Mr. Maybe by Jane Green. Chick lit.
I don't often buy used books, particularly since 99.5% of my book-buying these days is done online, and the difference in price between used and new really shrinks when you add in shipping costs (I always get enough new books to get free shipping). But when there's an out-of-print book I really, really want, I browse through the seller's other books to see if they have anything else I might want--in particular, some new-to-me author that I'm not yet ready to take a chance on buying new. And that's how Mr. Maybe ended up in my TBR pile.
Libby Mason's Mr. Right is wealthy, gorgeous, and willing to support her in the style to which she'd like to become accustomed. So when she meets Nick, who is gorgeous, but who's also a struggling unemployed writer "on the dole" (why does that sound better than "welfare" or "unemployment"?), she knows he can't be The One. But he's so fun and sexy that she can't resist spending time with him. They embark on a relationship that they keep reassuring each other isn't serious, but it turns out to be such a great relationship that Libby's starting to reassess her criteria, and despite her denial, she's starting to fall in love with him.
And then Nick breaks up with her.
Out with her girlfriend in an attempt to cheer up, she meets Ed McMann (I know I'm not the only one taken aback by his name--the PW review spelled it McMahon!), who's everything she thought she wanted. Okay, so he's not gorgeous, but he is sweet, and one of Britain's most eligible bachelors, and he's definitely willing to spend money on her.
And so maybe he gets on her nerves, and the sex is terrible, but it'll get better over time, right?
I had such a difficult time with this book at first. Libby is unabashedly materialistic--wearing designer clothes, going to the best restaurants and clubs, all in the search of her wealthy Mr. Right. And Nick wasn't much better--blame my Puritan American background, but I had a very hard time sympathizing with a young, healthy, intelligent person choosing to go on welfare rather than work.
But along the way, they grew on me. Mostly because they grew--or Libby did, at least. Nick redeemed himself in the end. Eh--the story is about Libby, growing, changing, learning--that's why it's chick lit (or women's fiction--I still prefer the chick lit label) and not romance.
I loved how Libby changed while she was with Nick, and then I loved how she tried very hard to make the relationship with Ed work. The format was great--she grew in the relationship with Nick, and those changes were evident in her relationship with Ed. And boy, could I relate to her determination to make it work, as well as to her decision that since it didn't work out with the man she loved, she was going to settle for the one who met her old criteria.
And unlike other stories with this plot, Libby did care about Ed and worried about hurting him.
I believe I have another one of Green's books in my TBR pile. I look forward to reading it.
...more
Categories: Books, 4.5stars, ChickLit
Labels: 4.5 stars, books, ChickLit
Friday, June 01, 2007
Sammy's Hill
****½ Sammy's Hill by Kristin Gore. Chick lit.
Little note to the naysayers on Amazon: Sammy's Hill is chick lit/women's fiction. It is not a political treatise; neither is it a memoir of life in national politics. It doesn't pretend to be, or try to be. Argh. That sort of thing really irks me. It's like saying this is a bad computer because you can't take a bath in it.
Samantha Joyce is a health-care advisor to Senator Robert Gary. She's also a bit of a hypochondriac and fish-killer. When she meets Aaron Driver, speechwriter to Senator Bramen (in the same party as Gary, but slimier), it looks like he might be The One.
There are a few problems along the road to true love--a minor scandal caused when Sammy Blackberries an explicit message to Aaron that ends up accidentally going to a couple hundred of Aaron's friends and associates--and Sammy's increasing unease with Aaron working for the backstabbing Senator Bramen.
Then the presidential race begins, and Bramen's the frontrunner. Gary ends up endorsing Bramen's chief rival and becomes the vice presidential candidate.
There are a lot of details about life in politics--from the give-and-take required to get a bill introduced, much less passed, to the grueling campaign trail. The frustrations of an idealistic newcomer are evident, but leavened with humor.
Sammy herself is a wonderfully vivid character. She's quite Bridget-Jones-ish in her distraction and self-deprecation, but she's herself, too. She's just short of being over-the-top--a character I could believe in and root for.
The romantic relationships are very realistic, but that was my only quibble: not that it took Sammy a while to find The One--I liked that--but that the development of the relationship with The One didn't get more emphasis. Not that it was necessary--just that I'd expected it.
I bought Sammy's Hill from the Amazon bargain bin on a whim, not having heard anything about it, but on a quest to find new authors. There's a sequel out shortly, and it's on my to-be-bought list.
...more
Categories: Books, 4.5stars, ChickLit
Labels: 4.5 stars, books, ChickLit
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
**** Ready or Not? by Chris Manby. Chick lit.
Still with the brief comments--I still have 8 more books from December I haven't written about yet. Yeesh.
Heidi and Ed are getting married in 4 months. There's just one fly in the ointment, and that's that Ed turns into a.... well, "complete moron" would be putting it politely... when he's with his rugby pals. And then Heidi's ex, Steven, comes back into her life, as an utterly attractive single dad. And he wants her back. But then again, Ed is her soul mate, right? And Heidi does not do kids.
I'm really of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it's a lot of fun, and there's a wonderful plot thread about Heidi's best friend Kara, a single mother, who's just started dating again that provides conflict both when Heidi agrees to babysit and pawns off all the work on Ed, and again when Kara can't tell her new beau about her baby.
But on the other hand, I felt like there was a bit of bait-and-switch, and it seemed to be saying that Ed and his friends' outrageous behavior (stripping each other naked and shaving off all their body hair?) was something most guys do, and nothing to get upset about. Maybe I'm just sheltered.
Regardless, it was a fun read, and I was perversely pleased that it didn't end the way I expected it to.
...more
Categories: Books, 4stars, ChickLit
Labels: 4 stars, books, ChickLit
Monday, December 11, 2006
***** Becoming Americana by Lara Rios. Chick lit.
Becoming Americana is a sequel of sorts to Becoming Latina in 10 Easy Steps (#11). It takes place several years later, when the young Lupe Perez we met in the first book is grown up and working on making it out of the old neighborhood. She's a student at UCLA and volunteers at The Vibe, a center for at-risk teens.
It's not easy. All she wants is to keep her head down, finish school, and get out. But when she helps a fellow student after a mugging, it leads to an article in the school paper making her sound like a heroine and an All-American success story--Bad Girl from the Barrio Makes Good--giving her celebrity and leading people to view her as a type, not a person. To top it off, her professor wants her to write her thesis on Americanization, so she's thinking about what it means to be American.
The story follows Lupe as she escapes her brother; moves in with Nash, The Vibe's director, who she's had a crush on for years; starts to date Will, the student who wrote the article; and has to make a choice between a great job and finishing school.
It's full of emotional ups and downs, gritty realism, love, heartbreak, acceptance, and betrayal. I shared her pain at the decision to leave her family; and I shared her dilemmas of Nash or Will, school or the job. Through it all, however, what Lupe wants is what we all want: to be accepted as ourselves. She made some mistakes and some good choices, and ultimately, everything turned out for the best.
Normally, I complain about epilogues. Not this time. This epilogue was the end of the story--it wouldn't have been finished without it. There's an exception to every rule.
I thoroughly enjoyed Becoming Latina in 10 Easy Steps, but I liked Becoming Americana even better. Because Lupe's past is darker, the story is darker, but it's also full of life and hope.
...more
Categories: Books, 5stars, ChickLit
Labels: 5 stars, books, ChickLit
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
***½ Velvet Rope Diaries by Daniella Brodsky. Chick lit.
Hmmm. I used to think that the anti-chick-lit lobby, who characterized the genre as being all about young women obsessed with clothes and shoes, didn't know what they were talking about. After reading two such books close together, I'm beginning to see what they mean. Fortunately, the other chick lit (#9) books I've read are allowing me to view these two as an aberration. My inner Mary Sunshine refuses to entertain the possibility that those (#3 & #9) previous reads (#3) are the ones that are unusual.
This one tries to be deep by having the heroine sabotaging her life because of guilt over her father's death when she was 8. That portion of the book was interesting and thought-provoking, but rather than making me feel sympathy for her, it just made me annoyed.
Other than that, Anna Walker is the typical chick lit heroine. She works as an assistant for a trendy NYC daily paper, until one day she vents her frustration over her boss by writing a mock-expose about her... and the paper's gossip columnist finds it and prints it. Surprisingly, this leads, not to being fired, but being offered a column of her own--writing about the hottest of the hot NYC nightlife.
She meets a sexy stranger, and deals with some strange vibes from her womanizing best friend and roommate, Ray.
It is actually an entertaining story, but every time I started enjoying it, up popped the guilt thread and brought me down again. I've been trying to figure out why that is, because I like--in fact, I prefer--my chick lit with a core of angst. I think it's because Anna knew all along what her problem was--she just kept dwelling on it, so it wasn't so much discovery and growth as it was practicing to get over it.
Whatever it was, this blend of chick lit and women's fiction elements, though I can see how it would work for some readers, just didn't work for me.
...more
Categories: Books, 3.5stars, ChickLit
Labels: 3.5 stars, books, ChickLit
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
**** Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding. Chick lit.
My daughter got this from the library while we were on vacation, and passed it on to me to read before she returned it. She loved it. I wasn't quite as enamored.
I didn't hate it, either. It was a fun read, but didn't have a whole lot of substance to it. I had to roll my eyes at all the Amazon reviews trashing the book because it mentioned Osama Bin Laden. One of these days, I'll have to write down my theory about things like that.
Anyway, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination is like a comedy version of the movie Conspiracy Theory. Olivia is a journalist who sees conspiracies and Big Stories everywhere, and finally stumbles on to one, by sheer accident.
My main complaint about the story is that it was too firmly straddling the fence between being a semi-serious James Bond-type story and being an over-the-top Stephanie Plum-type story. If it had leaned more either way, I'd have been much happier with it. Instead, we're asked to believe, for example, that ****spoiler****the CIA would recruit her on the spot as an agent because of her overactive imagination**** and without the support of the entire book being completely over-the-top, things like that just fall flat.
The romance, too, was too wishy-washy. I'd have been happier with it being focused on either less or more, or even left out completely. As it was, I couldn't believe in it, and it felt out of place.
I did, however, love Olivia's "Rules for Living." (#1: "Don't panic." #2: "No one is thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves, just like you.") In fact, I think they made the book for me. Without them, I'd probably have given the book 3 or 3.5 stars. Not just that the rules were present, but what they were, and how Olivia referred to them at times throughout the story.
...more
Categories: Books, 4stars, ChickLit
Labels: 4 stars, books, ChickLit
Monday, July 10, 2006
***** Seven Ways to Lose Your Lover by Alesia Holliday. Chick lit.
Yes, another excellent book. There's at least one more, then maybe I'll get to something I can complain about.
Shane is "The Breakup Artist." That is, she helps people get out of relationships by telling them how to get the other person to break up with them. Theoretically, it'll prevent bad feelings on the part of the dumpee... provided, of course, that said dumpee doesn't know they've been conned. Which, of course, is what happens.
I was prepared to be skeptical about this, because, as is fairly evident in my relationship theories, I don't like the games people play in relationships. Shane, though, isn't advocating anything--in fact, she reluctantly takes her talent public first to help out her boss, then to earn the money to buy into the partnership and help her neighbor realize his dream. And she worries about how it'll affect her karma constantly, making her much more likeable than I'd expected from the cover blurb.
Her first assignment is to extricate her boss's niece Lizzie from Awful Ben. Unfortunately, Lizzie is impatient and Ben overhears her gloating about her success, and he and his friend Gleason decide to confront The Breakup Artist.
What follows is a nicely intertwining story of Shane's work breaking up her clients, her roommate Annie who wants help breaking up with too-perfect Nick, her gay neighbors' career and relationship problems, and Ben's dilemma between attraction and revenge.
The characters are all well-drawn and understandable: there are no stereotypes or cliches here, and everyone has believable motivations for their actions. There's snappy dialogue, and laugh-out-loud wit, including a hilarious parrot scene, and Shane's adopted stray
Once again, Alesia Holliday has written a witty, warm, and just-this-side-of-out-of-control story that's a joy to read.
...more
Categories: Books, 5stars, ChickLit
Labels: 5 stars, books, ChickLit
