A misunderstanding over an offensive bet leads to good food and great sex in Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me. The characters are well-defined and the story is fast-paced, making for a fun and sexy novel.

Shannon Olson, the eponymous heroine of Shannon Olson’s Welcome to My Planet (Where English Is Sometimes Spoken) is a mess: bad job, worse credit, crazy family, and terrible taste in men. There are a few funny moments, and the writing is pretty good, but it’s just too far out there – what kind of self-respecting [...]

Is there anything more fun than reminiscing about old movies with new friends? In Looking for Andrew McCarthy, Jenny Colgan not only offers a great chick lit novel (girl gets dumped and goes on an impossible quest across the US), but also a look back at all those brat pack movies that I loved (and [...]

Animal Husbandry, by Laura Zigman, is one of the wackier books I’ve ever read – chick lit or otherwise. When Jane Goodall (no relation) gets dumped, she turns to the animal kingdom to try to make sense of her boyfriend’s behavior, and draws a number of startling and interesting parallels between animals and humans. It’s [...]

One of the earliest chick lit books, The Trials of Tiffany Trott, by Isabel Wolff, is also one of the most fun. Tiffany is 37 and still looking for Mr. Right in a quest that leads her to classified ads, blind dates, Club Med, and pretty much anywhere else single men might conceivably hang out. [...]

Fiona Walker’s French Relations has a lot of good points, and one scene in particular is laugh-until-you-bawl funny. But it has some bad ones too, like obvious and repeated foreshadowing (I think I counted 10 mentions of the same event) and an over-reliance on puns for laughs. They can be funny, sure, but that sort [...]

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’ [...]

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 [...]