Review - This is Chick-Lit

A couple of months ago I was contacted by BenBella books, did I want a free copy of a book they were publishing? Needless to say, I did. And they sent it to me.

This is Chick-Lit is a response to Random House's 2005 release, This is Not Chick-Lit, which Lauren Baratz-Logsted thought was insulting. What's so bad about Chick-Lit? And, actually, the lines drawn between Lit and Chick-Lit seems to echo the lines drawn between WOHM and SAHM. And y'all know how I feel about that.

The short stories in TiCL are well-written, often funny, occasionally sad. Most of the women in the stories share a common trait: a lack of a fundamental self-confidence. For most, that self-confidence is found by the end of the story. They are stories "by, for, and about women".

My favorite story of the group is Two Literary Chicks, which starts with college aquaintances bumping into each other on the street. They had met in a writing class years before and each despised the other's writing then. The meeting, and what happens to each of them because of it, rings true and is written lovingly.

One story goes into Stephen King territory. The Third Eye is a strange and eerie telling of the consequences of ill-considered plastic surgery.

Another one, Meeting Cute, has haunted me for the last few days.

These stories have been written especially for this book as a response from the Chick-Lit world to the gauntlet thrown down by the literati. As an olive branch, each author also included her favorite Serious Female author. I can see that during my next vacation, I'll have a ton of reading to do.