The Unexpected Consequences of Love, by Jill Mansell, tells the intertwining stories of three couples, covering the whole gamut from old love to new love to unrequited love.
Tag: English chick lit
Tell Him About It
If I had to sum up Holly Kinsella’s novel Tell Him About It in a single word, it would be “meh.” The slow-paced story is very predictable and the characters’ endless inner thoughts are obvious and repetitive. Worse, the viewpoint switches between characters constantly and confusingly, even within a single paragraph. Several of the characters […]
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.
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 […]
Out of the Blue
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 […]
Bridget Jones’s Diary Returns
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 […]
The Trials of Tiffany Trott
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. […]
French Relations
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 […]
The Edge of Reason
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 […]
Just Friends
It’s set in New York, but I would definitely classify Just Friends, by Robyn Sisman, as English chick lit. Either way, the whole book is fun and there are a couple of truly hilarious scenes. The characters and, more importantly, the various mix-ups and misunderstandings are believable, which makes them all the funnier. This is […]