It’s fun to imagine that incredibly smart guys, called “nerds” in high school, will grow up to be rich and successful while the jocks and other popular kids will end working at a gas station. Vicki Lewis Thompson’s Nerd in Shining Armor takes this fantasy a few steps further. The nerd in question is not [...]

If The Edge of Reason, the sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary, left you wanting more, then you’re in luck: Helen Fielding did another series of columns which are available online. (Or maybe you’re not as lame as I am and already read them when they were published 3 years ago.) Anyway, it’s a little bit [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]