Archive for April 8th, 2010

Chick Lit Classics is a new feature on Chick Lit Reviews where we highlight the books we feel are classics of the chick lit genre. Feel free to discuss our choices in the comments section!

With Becky Bloomwood due to be back in the shops in September, we feel that now is the perfect time to tell you about one of the most classic chick lit reads you may ever come across: Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella (originally titled The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic). It’s one of my all-time favourite novels and I just plain old love Becky Bloomwood and her crazy adventures always have me laughing out loud and I can’t wait to get back into her world! I’m going to be re-reading the entire series for our Sophie Kinsella week in August/September and I’m so looking forward to it! There’s also a film out starring Isla Fisher as Becky although, to be honest, I didn’t think it did the book justice at all so the less said about it the better!

Meet Rebecca Bloomwood. She’s a journalist. She spends her working life telling others how to manage their money. She spends her leisure time …shopping. Retail therapy is the answer to all her problems. She knows she should stop, but she can’t. She tries Cutting Back, she tries Making More Money. But neither seems to work. The stories she concocts become more and more fantastic as she tries to untangle her increasingly dire financial difficulties. Her only comfort is to buy herself something - just a little something …Can Becky ever escape from this dream world, find true love, and regain the use of her Switch card? Confessions of a Shopaholic …the perfect pick me up for when it’s all hanging in the (bank) balance.

I’ve heard some fab things about Sarah Dunn’s novel Secrets To Happiness so when I saw it was going to be released in the UK, I was thrilled. It’s due out on 25th November and I can’t wait for it’s release. One of the things I fell in love with about the novel was the American cover so I’m rather disappointed that the UK version is a bit… well, crap. Having a proper girl, dog and taxi against a fake backdrop looks horribly tacky and I much prefer the simple dog on it’s back USA cover. (I feel a Cover Wars coming on!) Here’s the synopsis, anyway:

Holly Frick just went through the worst kind of divorce: the one where you’re still in love with the person divorcing you. Facing up to life on her own, she needs a distraction to keep her mind off her own non-existent love life.

Like Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, Holly is intimately involved in the lives of those closest to her, and now she feels compelled to give advice with unwavering moral certainty. And, like Emma, she is often completely off the mark. Soon she’s in over her head, advising her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend while at the same time falling for her married friend’s new lover. Until, happiness arrives from a very unexpected source . . .

With a contemporary twist on Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Secrets to Happiness is a hilarious look at the things people will do to be happy.