Oh, Sophie Kinsella, you are like popcorn, light and airy, able to finish quickly and easily, enjoyable but don’t stick around long. I read most of Can You Keep A Secret on the plane to NYC and the rest that night in my hotel, but forgot to include it yesterday.
Why oh why do I enjoy reading books that are like movies on the page these days? It’s the whole chick lit genre that’s got me so stumped. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here for the record: I’m convinced chick lit is the Harlequin of my generation. I read these books the same way my mother read romance novels: quickly and efficiently, where all the plots blend into one, where all the media/publishing/magazine jobs blur and all the characters, unlike Lee from Prep, are hidden beauties, and all the men are gorgeous and rich, of course. Where does this life exist?
Let’s start a faction to write real chick lit, oh, wait, it already exists, doesn’t it? In the voices of Toews and others who don’t see romance as a means of escaping the fact that you still need a plot that you can’t poke a hole the size of an elephant through and character development for a novel to, well, be a bloody novel.