Though I don’t care at all about Kung Fu, I loved Karen Brichoux’s Coffee and Kung Fu. The (brief) comparisons to martial arts movies are fun and even interesting, but it’s the author’s descriptions and dialogues that really make this book stand out. One line in particular, which I can’t remember exactly so I won’t [...]

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 [...]

The first American chick lit I read was Otherwise Engaged: A Novel, by Suzanne Finnamore. While the story progresses from engagement to wedding, it’s not really about that so much as it is about relationships and life changes. It’s a bit more serious than, say, Bridget Jones’s Diary, but it’s also more real, and it’s [...]