All tagged Chick Lit

Recommendation Tuesday: You Had Me at Hello by Mhairi McFarlane

(No, Recommendation Tuesday isn't an actual thing, but I wanted to highlight this book without writing a formal review/think piece/whatever, so I'm running with it.)

Do nothing, and nothing happens. Life is about decisions. You either make them or they’re made for you, but you can’t avoid them.

The first book I read this year was one I downloaded from Edelweiss on a whim because none of the 500+ books on my Kindle, nor any of the books falling out of my overflowing bookshelves seemed like they'd fit what I was in the mood to read. 

I hate winter with a passion, and wanted something light but not shallow to pick me up--and believe it or not, that sort of thing is tough to find. Fortunately, I was lucky enough (after trying some straight-up terrible ones--I'm looking at you, On the Rocks) to stumble upon Scottish author Mhairi McFarlane's You Had Me at Hello, which was extremely popular upon its release in the U.K.

At its core, You Had Me at Hello is a story about friendship. 

University's like this little world, a bubble of time separate from everything before and everything after.

Rachel and Ben met their first day at college and instantly became an inseparable duo. We see their friendship grow throughout college through a series of scattered flashbacks from present day, which finds Rachel and Ben separated for several years. 

A Feel-Good Novel with Surprising Weight: It Felt Like a Kiss by Sarra Manning

But then again, one kiss from someone could mean more than a two-year relationship with someone else. A kiss could change your life.

Sarra Manning’s Unsticky is a novel I recommend all the time—I love how Manning plays with common tropes and archetypes, subverting them into fresh and witty stories. Her newest novel, It Felt Like a Kiss, is no different. And, it has the added bonus of being something of a companion novel to Unsticky, as Vaughn from that novel plays an important role in this one as the owner of the art gallery where It Felt Like a Kiss protagonist Ellie Cohen works.

Ellie lives a carefully-produced life, a reaction to her chaotic, bohemian upbringing with her musician mother.

...when all around you was chaos, you needed to find some area of your life that you could control and let that define you. It didn’t matter that she was on free schoolmeals and had a mother who wore leopard-print catsuits and dressed her in charity-shop clothes, when Ellie had the neatest handwriting in her class and was homework monitor five years in a row. Or when she had a tidier bedroom and better manners than her many cousins, who all lived in two-parent, semi-detached splendour in Belsize Park. When your boss was giving you hell and your flatmates were fighting and you’d been dumped again, there was something cathartic and peaceful in spending the afternoon in your pristine, minimalist office, rearranging your reference books by height and colour. So, a girl who could parade around Glastonbury in a spotless white dress was a girl who was calm and in control. Sometimes you had to fake it to make it.

Love Overdue by Pamela Morsi: Unevenness Defined

“D.J. considered herself some kind of an expert in compartmentalizing. It was undoubtedly a genetic trait. She’d shown early talent in boxing up every aspect of her life, careful never to taint any experience with another. Everything about life, the precious, the bitter, the uncertain, could be perfectly managed and excellently controlled if it was kept securely on its own.”

I read this one because another book by Morsi, The Lovesick Cure, was highly recommended to me, and was analyzed in-depth on Romance Novels for Feminists. So, of course, instead of reading that book, I read this random Morsi novel, Love Overdue, with one of those can't-resist-cute covers.

Yes, I am a sucker for those covers with the feet--don't judge me too harshly. 

While there were a number of elements that worked for me, particularly Morsi's writing--which is fast-paced and flows nicely, Love Overdue exemplifies the mixed bag, uneven novel, which are some of the hardest to write about. 

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