The eponymous heroine of Dalya Moon’s Smart Mouth Waitress is an 18-year-old named Perry who has been left in charge of taking care of her father and younger brother while her mom is off on a creative quest. Perry decides it’s time to find a boyfriend and lose her virginity, and her first step on [...]

While it’s not quite a Harlequin romance novel, the fairly graphic descriptions in Perfect for You make it a bit steamier than run-of-the-mill chick lit – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I liked the story a lot, I cared about all the characters, and I enjoyed the various subplots. As for negatives, the sabotage [...]

If you’re looking for a quick, cute read, J.W. Bull’s Pickin’ Tomatoes might be just the thing. The protagonist manages to get a job writing a column about cooking, though she is neither a chef nor a writer. So of course she has to learn to do both, and fast. Some of the cooking disasters [...]

Susie Gilmore’s Love Stuck is based on a cute idea: the protagonist can’t decide between two men, so about halfway through the book, she leaves it up to you: read only the left-hand pages for Bachelor #1, and only the right-hand pages for Bachelor #2. When I was a kid, I loved the Choose Your [...]

Part love story, part family drama, Stephanie Haddad’s Love Regifted doesn’t really manage to pull off either one. The story about the new love interest was fine, but the old one was absurd (see spoilers, below). And pretty much everything related to the mysterious phone call was both obvious (I knew immediately what was going [...]

Writing negative reviews is even less fun than reading bad books, so when Janet Eve Josselyn asked me to review her novel Thin Rich Bitches, the title alone was enough to give me pause. After reading the decidedly mixed reviews on the net, I wrote back to tell the author that I had a feeling [...]

I love Jenny Colgan books, and Meet Me at the Cupcake Café is even better than the usual fare because it combines two of my favorite things: sweet and funny chick lit with yummy food. When protagonist Issy Randall is made redundant (American translation: laid off), she decides to follow her dream of opening a [...]

Though I love the TV show, Candace Bushnell’s book Sex and the City is very dull. I actually read it long before I ever started watching the show – in fact, that’s why I held out for so long. You know how you read a fantastic book and then are often disappointed by the book? [...]

Marian Keyes, the queen of Irish chick lit, delved into the serious subject of drug addiction in her third book, Rachel’s Holiday, but managed an amazing job of mixing those horror stories with romance and humor. The end result is a wonderful book about another of the Walsh sisters – it’s funny and sad, serious [...]

Isabel Wolff will always remain one of my favorite chick lit authors, even though I was incredibly disappointed by her third book, Out of the Blue. It’s the story of a woman whose husband has an affair and leaves her, sort of, but never manages to completely make the break – and she doesn’t really [...]