Dishy summer reading

REVIEWS BY IRIS BLASI

Lazy summer days call for cozying up with great summer chick lit picks. If you want to cool down by digging into something dishy as the temperature spikes, here are a few choice selections.

Like many young adult authors these days—including Zoey Dean and Ann Brashares—Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries, has expanded her reach into adult fiction. Cabot's light, humorous voice is just right for chick lit. In Queen of Babble in the Big City, Lizzie Nichols has moved to New York City following the European travels chronicled in her first adventure, The Queen of Babble. Unfortunately, she's jobless and apartment-less. Luckily, her boyfriend Luke (who happens to be the best friend of Chaz, her best friend Shari's boyfriend) has access to his parent's spacious Fifth Avenue digs while they're abroad. When he invites her to shack up, the living situation is solved; Chaz hooks her up with a receptionist job at his father's law firm, and voila!—she has a steady paycheck.

But not all of Lizzie's problems are solved that easily. Doubts nag her about her future with Luke, and her receptionist job is hardly professionally fulfilling. What Lizzie really wants to do is custom re-design vintage wedding dresses for modern brides. It's great, then, when she talks her way into an apprenticeship at a mom-and-pop dress shop doing just that, but the store is in peril of closing. Lizzie may just be able to bring in a high-profile client, but will she be able to do the dress and save the shop? And, with Lizzie burning the candle at both ends by working at the dress shop and the law firm, where does that leave her relationship? If the ending seems a mite too swift and short, then that's surely a symptom of setting the stage for a sequel.


Being a trendsetter

In How to Be Cool, former ugly duckling Kylie Chase uses her own transformation (including a 75-pound weight loss) as the basis for launching a career as a "cool instructor," helping the tragically un-trendy unleash their chic. Kylie's clients (and her boss) don't know about her well-hidden past, as she confides only in her best friend, an up-and-coming plus-size model. Still, Kylie's on top of the world until a fire sends her apartment—including the contents of her closet—up in flames. Kylie is forced to move back in with her parents, thereby violating one of the cardinal rules of cool: Thou shalt not live with thy parents past 22. It doesn't help matters that a hot young journalist is tracking her every move as he writes a story about her. The stress of keeping her inner dorkdom hidden is compounded by the rapid approach of her 10th high school reunion, propelling Kylie back into old habits, and the pounds slowly start to pile back on.

Will Kylie be able to keep her own cool as the heat turns up? Readers will truly care about her fate, as Johanna Edwards (The Next Big Thing) has created an appealing, Jennifer Weiner-esque protagonist. Kylie may not be the coolest girl on the block, but her flaws are precisely the reason readers will love her.


Winning hearts in Texas

College football isn't the only sport in Texas. Husband-hunting has its own fanatic devotees, as a group of women work ruthlessly to net themselves men with major bank accounts. Big hair, bigger boobs and Botoxed brows as far as the eye can see are quite a culture shock for 29-year-old Dallas transplant Jenny Barton, a Wall Street Journal reporter (as author J.C. Conklin was earlier in her career) from New York.

The fish-out-of-water (or, in this case, perhaps the cattle out of the pasture) story told in The Dallas Women's Guide to Gold-Digging with Pride serves as a hysterical guidebook to Texas customs as Conklin sees them. The goal of all this husband-hunting is to be in "tall cotton," defined as nabbing a seriously bankrolled boyfriend who effortlessly pops a ring on your finger and doesn't require a prenup. Good thing Jenny, juggling a bad boy and an über-religious guy simultaneously, has a gaggle of mentors, including her gold-digging roommate Aimee (who, post-divorce #1, is onto an awkward billionaire with whom intimacy requires popping a handful of prescription pills).

The fast-paced book flies by in a flurry of designer labels and blond hair, but there's meat in this meal—notably, the issue of what happens to half-Jewish Jenny in highly Christian country.


Iris Blasi is a writer and editor in New York City.

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