You’ve probably noticed by now that I have my own rating system for the chick lit I read and review: the Chick Literate Heart Awards. I rate books with 0 to 5 hearts, and there’s a graphic to go with each one. You can click on the graphic to see a list of all the [...]

I can’t believe Jennifer Weiner’s In Her Shoes was actually made into a movie - actually I can. It’s for people who like to laugh at (not with) other people. One of the main characters, Maggie, is mean, spiteful, selfish, greedy, and a bitch (not to put too fine a point on it). Oh, and [...]

I love, love, love Marian Keyes’s Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married. Though it’s not perfect (see spoilers, below), I enjoy the story and particularly certain scenes so much that I’m still able to reread it regularly and enjoy it just as much each time I do. I really like Lucy, and overall the book is [...]

A modern day epistolary novel, Meg Cabot’s Boy Meets Girl is told entirely through emails, notes, instant messaging, voice mails, and the like. Except I don’t - like it, that is. It’s one thing for a book to be written in the form of two people writing letters to one another - where both parties’ [...]

Zany, mean, and stupid characters can be really funny, but it’s easy to go over the top and make them impossible, and once that happens I don’t enjoy the book as much. The strange thing is that oftentimes these kinds of people actually exist - they really are that stupid. I’ve known a few, but [...]

The second (and final) Bridget Jones book, Helen Fielding’s The Edge of Reason, isn’t as good as the first, but it’s definitely worth a read or five. The timing is off in places (e.g., Magda’s pregnancy/new baby in the two books) and some of the situations are a little too outrageous, but all in all [...]

I’m sure that Sheila O’Flanagan tried to dumb down the financial market info in Suddenly Single, but even so I couldn’t understand much of it (and there was a lot) and therefore the whole story was far less interesting than it might have been. There was no humor, either, so in the end I found [...]

More a collection of short stories than a novel, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, by Melissa Bank, is on the smarter and more serious end of the chick lit spectrum. I’m not normally a fan of short stories, preferring to spend the length of a novel getting to know a few characters and [...]

It’s set in New York, but I would definitely classify Just Friends, by Robyn Sisman, as English chick lit. Either way, the whole book is fun and there are a couple of truly hilarious scenes. The characters and, more importantly, the various mix-ups and misunderstandings are believable, which makes them all the funnier. This is [...]

For a long time I hesitated to read Lolly Winston’s Good Grief because, given the title and plot (young widow starts over), I thought it would be too sad. And it is sad, in parts, but it is also beautifully written and I really liked it. The grief is palpable at times, but the tender [...]