NYT Book World reviewed what it defines as a new breed of chick lit - the grown up version - and did not hate it. Sure, the review takes some shots. That’s not new or original or even interesting. The bottom line is that the book got a thumb’s up. Having the word “literacy” in the title likely helped.

The book: Literacy and Longing in L.A. by Jennifer Kaufman and Karen Mack

The opening paragraph of the review:

Chick lit appears to be in its death throes. At the very least, the form has bred copycats and lost its novelty and sense of humor. More and more of these featherweights have fallen flat, and some of the genre’s exhausted stalwarts have even done the unthinkable: they have grown up.

How the review describes it:

The book’s good-looking, self-deprecating heroine is 35-year-old Dora, who was in fact named for [Eudora] Welty and has a sister, Virginia, named for Woolf. Dora combines her book benders with marathon bubble baths, and she indulges in them when everything else in her life is going haywire. As a character who carries around a nonfiction literary history of Henry James and plans to read it at the hairdresser’s, she surely has the potential to be annoying. But she is hapless and candid enough to be endearing, and the book fetish strongly works in her favor.

Apparently chick lit is dead but the book is good. That’s something.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 25th, 2006 at 6:40 am and is filed under About Authors, About Books, About Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.