Chick Lit Roundup

I've been so busy with nonfiction book reviews that I haven't had much time to read any fiction lately, but I at least get to see what's going on. I've been fairly impressed in the last couple months with the increasing range of Avon's trade paperback chick lit line. Sure, they have plenty of the usual U.K./U.S. white girl stuff, like The Sweetest Taboo from Carole Matthews and Alisa Kwitney's On the Couch (though it's not really fair to call Kwitney's stuff "usual"). But they're also bringing out stuff like Going Buck Wild, Nina Foxx's Austin-based African-American romance, and Goddess for Hire, which, depending on how far Sonia Singh runs with this idea that her protagonist is an incarnation of Kali flitting about Newport Beach, may actually straddle the line between chick lit and fantasy...

Not that I would want to pin myself down to just one publisher, though; if I was headed anywhere near a beach this month, I'd probably bring along the newly released paperback of Maneater, since the opening chapter struck me as fairly amusing. (But, hey, remember, I'm the guy who liked Bergdorf Blondes, so your mileage may vary...) And though they could've done some more work on the cover art for How to Meet Cute Boys, the interior seems pretty sassy. Deanna Kizis, the West Coast editor of Elle, busts up her novel with faux articles that nail the women's magazine voice with dead-on precision. Speaking of dead-on precision, check out the cover for Megan McAndrew's Going Topless--at first I thought it was a new Diane Johnson novel. No, wait, that's not just a perfect imitation of Johnson's covers, it's her cover artist, Nina Berkson. What I can glean of the plot's interweaving of love and money also sounds Johnsonesque, so I'm going to set this one aside and give it a try...