It’s a cute premise, but the accidents in Tara Mills’s Accidents Make the Heart Grow Fonder cross the line into ridiculous more than once. Then, inexplicably, there’s a long stretch of injury-free dating, and then more accidents. Other than that, and the fact that I found Jackson’s interest in Sabrina somewhat farfetched, it was a […]
Elly in Bloom
Elly in Bloom, by Colleen Oakes, is the floweriest book I’ve ever read. I know I’ve read other chick lit featuring florists, but this one describes flowers and bouquets and wedding arrangements in exquisite-verging-on-excruciating detail. It’s kind of fun, but it gets a bit tedious.
Winter Wonderland
If you’re ready to visit a snowy paradise, you could do worse than to read reading Belinda Jones’s Winter Wonderland. A hands-on travel agent is at Québec’s Winter Carnival, where she meets handsome and mysterious men with secrets and secret identities.
Smart Mouth Waitress
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 […]
Perfect for You
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 […]
The Food of Love
The story of Cyrano de Bergerac’s love for Roxane has been retold and retooled umpteen times on stage, in film, and in writing, yet The Food of Love, by Anthony Capella, still manages to bring a unique spin to the well-known tale. In this case, Roxane is Laura, an American 20-something visiting Italy for the […]
Pickin’ Tomatoes
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 […]
Love Stuck
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 […]
Love Regifted
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 […]
Thin Rich Bitches
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 […]