Estimated read time: 6-7 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Ladies, to tide you over through Labor Day, we've gone through a stack of chick-lit releases and rated them so you can zero in on your ideal beach companion. Happy clucking!
"An Ex to Grind" by Jane Heller (William Morrow, $24.95).
This one gets our "most amusing title" vote, and the novel itself is almost as funny, despite the goofy plot. Melanie, a hardworking and successful Manhattan financial planner, is appalled at the idea of paying alimony to her shiftless ex, the slacker and ex-footballer Dan, who is spending her hard-earned money on Cristal and Gucci designer duds. Furious Melanie finds a loophole: If he cohabits with another woman for 90 days, the alimony ends. Melanie hires a matchmaker and sneakily sets him up, only to discover that Dan has transformed himself into a motivated guy with an actual job. Melanie wants him back-or does she? Heller has fun with the ambiguities.
"Balancing in High Heels" by Eileen Rendahl (Downtown Press, $13).
Public defender Alissa Lindley is battling a recalcitrant fax machine to save her client from incarceration, when her cellphone rings. It's Alissa's errant husband, demanding that she sign divorce papers because his girlfriend is pregnant.
Can you blame Alissa for flinging the fax machine across the room and using it for a trampoline? She ends up in an anger-management group along with people like wife-beater Caleb, who has "extremely strong feelings about exactly how his wife should park the car in the garage."
Moving back to San Jose, where her family and her best friend live, Alissa finds herself defending a gorgeous stripper who (with a posse of friends) has been righting small-scale wrongs all over Silicon Valley. The arresting officer is extremely, um, arresting, and Alissa starts putting her life back together. The ending is highly improbable, but hey, this is escapist fiction.
"The Bad Mother's Handbook" by Kate Long (Ballantine Books, $21.95).
An endearing first novel, set in England, where three generations of women are coping with their own sets of problems. Stuck in the middle is the well-meaning Karen, the mom who can't seem to do anything right with her daughter Charlotte - who is 17, pregnant and miserable, just as Karen herself had been a generation earlier. Meanwhile, Karen's kindly mother, Nan, is getting dottier by the day (she hides food and broken things under the couch cushions). This all sounds pretty grim, but it's actually funny, particularly when Charlotte wonders if she inherited "tart DNA" from her mother. There is a lovely sweetness to this heartbreaking/heartwarming story, and more than a few plot twists along the way.
"Before Sunrise" by Diana Palmer (HQN Books, $16.95).
The phone call from a professor who claims that Neanderthal remains have been found near a North Carolina construction site surprises museum curator Phoebe Keller. After all, no Neanderthal remains have ever been found in North America. Phoebe is even more surprised when the professor's body is found shortly thereafter on a nearby American Indian reservation. Then the handsome, taciturn Jeremiah Cortez, a Comanche lawman, turns up to handle the investigation, and the plot gets an extra stir. Phoebe and Jeremiah have an unhappy history together; Palmer unravels their past and settles their future in the style her romance readers have long loved.
"The Starter Wife" by Gigi Levangie Grazer (Simon & Schuster, $24).
This hilarious insider's look at Hollywood/Malibu movie-industry marriage and divorce is full of wonderful details, though the lifestyles of the rich and would-be famous sound more exhausting than enticing. Gracie Pollock, a 40-ish mom who's the wife of successful movie exec Kenny, has her hands full trying to keep young and beautiful (via a nonstop schedule of beauty treatments) and to remember which saleswoman can get her the latest must-have handbag. When Kenny dumps her via cellphone, shortly before their 10th anniversary, Gracie's privileged life ends. She becomes invisible; he starts squiring Britney Spears around town. Readers will root for Gracie, even as she moves toward a most unlikely denouement.
"The Year of Pleasures" by Elizabeth Berg (Random House, $24.95).
Tender and moving, Elizabeth Berg's 14th novel chronicles a year in the life of newly widowed Betta Nolan, who moves to a big old house in a small town after the death of her husband. Her posse of three college girlfriends arrives to cheer her up; the 10-year-old boy next door helps her unpack and disarms her grief with his conversation, which extends from life and death to the merits of Dr. Pepper. The charm of this book is the comfort of small things in life, the little serendipities and pleasures that help Betta heal.
"The Ballroom on Magnolia Street" by Sharon Owens (Putnam, $15).
Best-selling Irish author Sharon Owens ("The Tea House on Mulberry Street") returns with another saga of intersecting lives and loves, this time centering around a flamboyant man who presides over a successful ballroom. Johnny "Hollywood" Hogan, orphaned during the Blitz and raised by grandparents, grows up determined to live a glamorous life. He opens the ballroom and falls in love with a beautiful girl who reminds him of Marilyn Monroe, but his character flaws keep him from real happiness. Owens weaves his story in with that of a pair of mismatched sisters and other characters who frequent the ballroom, as everyone searches for their own version of bliss. Fans of Maeve Binchy will find echoes of that writer here.
"The Gift Bag Chronicles" by Hilary de Vries (Random House, $12.95).
This one's hilarious - and it rings true. Alex Davidson, head of event planning at a big Tinseltown PR firm, is dealing with manic celebrities and celebrity wannabes who change their minds constantly about whether the ribbon on the garter in the wedding guests' gift bags should be matte or sateen. Meanwhile, Alex is dealing with one of the firm's regular clients-from-hell, a magazine whose picky editors don't think the PR efforts are adequate, and she's trying to keep alive a bicoastal relationship with the eligible but perpetually unavailable Charles. Author Hilary de Vries has a wicked eye for detail: "Her tone of voice is one decibel short of a 911 call, but given the cotton-candy world swaddling Jennifer Schwartzbaum, a former exotic dancer and now bride-to-be of Jeffrey Hawker, the much-married, much-divorced star of the long-running sitcom Lovin' It,' her problems, such as they are, tend to top out atCollagen or Restylane?'''
"Sea Music" by Sara MacDonald (Atria Books, $25).
A touching and eloquent novel set on the Cornish coast, this one moves between the late 1990s and the World War II years, with three generations of a family whose secrets have been long hidden. The elderly Fred and Martha Tremain have always told everyone that they met in London, where Martha (who is Jewish) had fled the Nazis; they then built the house in Cornwall and produced two children. But granddaughter Lucy, who has been helping to care for her elderly grandparents, discovers a long-hidden chest in the attic that calls everything she knew into question. Sara MacDonald gives us scenes of the prewar years, the war and its aftermath, and the cost of hiding what really happened to Martha. It's an engrossing read.
"Straighter, Stronger, Leaner, Longer," by Renee Daniels with Janice Billingsley (Avery/Penguin Group, $18.95).
While you're sitting on your beach towel, you may as well try some of these moves for fixing that aching back, those sore knees or those pathetically weak core muscles you've gotten from, er, too much sitting around and reading. This excellent book by a former Alvin Ailey dancer explains body mechanics, posture and common problems, giving a series of clearly illustrated moves, exercises and workouts. All together now: Let's try that Trunk Flexion Stretch.
---
(c) 2005, The Seattle Times. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
