If you like books with a mix of comedy and tragedy, then Anna Maxted’s Getting Over It is just the ticket. Helen has a terrible track record with men, and at first the death of her father barely fazes her. But as the story unfolds, she develops closer relationships with a few different people and [...]

If you think chick lit is dead, think again – the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance, held for the first time in 2007 and the second just a few days ago, could almost be called the Chick Lit Award. I think it’s great – tons of people (women and men) read these books, and [...]

I really liked parts of Katie Fforde’s Living Dangerously, and because of that I’ve read it several times. Polly, the protagonist, is 35 and happy to live on her own. She seems like a perfectly pleasant person. However, the implausability of it all eventually gets to me.
SPOILERS

I love wacky books, and Talking to Addison, by Jenny Colgan, doesn’t disappoint. The narrator lives with a bunch of misfits, one of whom she is determined to befriend, despite his evident lack of interest in talking to her. The whole book is very funny, but there are a few truly hilarious, tears-rolling-down-your-face moments, and [...]

Mameve Medwed’s first novel, Mail, is a great example of intelligent chick wit. The heroine spends her days writing short stories, sending them off in the hopes of publication, and dreaming about the mail man. It’s well-written and fairly funny, but I was a bit bothered by the class conflict – I just couldn’t relate [...]

There are a few characteristics of Harlequin Romance-type novels that I always seem to notice. Some of these are pretty minor or subtle, but because I read so much I see them over and over and they begin to take on a much bigger importance and distract me from the actual story.
First, the sex always [...]

Honeymoon, by Amy Jenkins, is one of my very favorite chick lit novels. It’s both funny and clever, and I felt a strong connection with the heroine and several other characters. She’s about to get married, even though she hasn’t seen the Love of Her Life in years. Her fiancé is a good guy but [...]

Though it’s not Jennifer Crusie’s first book, Welcome to Temptation is the first one I read. It’s a little bit more Harlequin-romancy than most chick lit, but it has some likeable characters and some unlikeable ones that are fairly believable, and the story was fun – there are a couple of love stories, some good [...]

If you were to take a crash course on chick lit, Watermelon, by Marian Keyes, would be required reading. This début novel begins with Claire in the hospital, where she has just given birth to her first child a few minutes before her husband arrives to tell her that he’s leaving her for another woman. [...]

It’s kind of hard to define chick lit. The early books, like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Watermelon, tended to be light-hearted. The women might be flawed and undergo some traumatic events, but they usually had a pretty good sense of humor about it all. These are the books I adore.
The phenomenal success of Helen Fielding [...]