I was sent two books to review a couple of weeks ago, which is not that unusual, really — I'm often sent books for review, it's just that they have titles like Situations and Individuals, not like Some Like It Haute. (Although, Colleen from MIT, if you are reading this, I really am planning to review Situations and Individuals, mostly because I desperately want to know what "His subsequent argumentation provides a unified semantics for the donkey anaphoric and bound and referential uses of pronouns" means.)

Ahem. So, as I was saying, I was sent two books to review. The first was Some Like It Haute , which I was looking forward to — it's about a fashion writer! in Paris! for the shows! — but which I was disappointed by. I was hoping for something like a fashion Dick Francis, one of my fave mystery writers. Although Francis was a jockey and all his books have something, more or less, to do with racing, he made a point of researching other things (like wineselling, small plane piloting, and glassblowing) and having his stories develop naturally from what he learned about those things. You read one of those and you ingest an awful lot of fascinating facts, painlessly. (Plus all of his heroes are Competent Calm Men, which I have a weakness for.) Unfortunately, Haute's author, Julie K.L. Dam, is no Dick Francis. Her fashion references could have been made with anyone with access to six months' of Harper's Bazaar, and the plot has all the emotional resonance of an episode of Scooby-Doo, and about the same amount of "wacky" coincidences. Plus, the heroine blows off her work for a guy! I know, I know, the focus of chick lit is not the job of the chick, but if you are going to make the entire setup of the meet-cute the chick's job, you might want to have her take it SERIOUSLY.

So it was with some trepidation that I took up
Finishing Touches, another example of the genre. That trepidation was entirely unwarranted. Finishing Touches is a touching, real story–a good old-fashioned STORY story, one that doesn't rely on the wacky, or the dropping of brand names so relentlessly that you expect Jimmy Choo to share the copyright. I have so little time for pleasure reading that I want to spend my book time with the same sort of people that I'd like to spend real time with–interesting, human people, not people who might as well be Pez dispensers, full of barely-flavored sugar with interchangeable heads. Finishing Touches is full of multidimensional people you'd like to know, especially the heroine, Jesse, who grows and changes in ways that don't involve her closet. There's real sorrow in this book, and real happiness, and neither comes in the way you expect it to. Certainly worth reading, and I'll probably look up Deanna Kizis's earlier book, How to Meet Cute Boys.