OK, let's call it what it really is - chick lit. And just like anything else, there is good, bad and downright ugly among the many thousands of women's fiction books out there. After a couple of intense books (including the last book of The Hunger Games, which I finally finished over the holidays), I decided it was time to try something lightweight. Within a week, I had finished two books which definitely fall into the chick lit category: Lisa Unger's Fragile and Isabel Wolff's A Vintage Affair.
At first glance, Fragile seemed to be a quick, fun read- small town mystery, girl who goes missing, families torn apart by secrets -with characters that seemed both interesting and believable. But the fun stopped there. The first warning sign came when I kept putting Fragile down and conveniently forgetting to pick it back up. By the time I was halfway through, it was almost painful to try to finish it. Not only was Fragile poorly constructed, jumping back and forth between present day and the past, but there were so many subplots and twists that by the final chapter, I had no idea who half the people were and what crimes they had committed, and nor did I care. Unger's cringe-worthy last line - "... how the connections between them were as terribly fragile as they were indelible." - is the perfect example of how poorly written the book is.
Lisa Unger is a popular writer, with several bestselling books to her credit. I went into Fragile thinking that it might not be Pulitzer prize-winning, but would certainly keep my interest. It was nothing but a disappointment, and despite having a free, dowloaded copy of Beautiful Lies by Unger on my Kindle, I don't think I can bring myself to give her another try.
With some misgivings, I quickly moved on to Isabel Wolff's A Vintage Affair, a novel that was well-reviewed and sounded intriguing. A Vintage Affair is about Phoebe, a young woman who leaves her job at Sotheby's to opens her own vintage clothing store in London. While it is definitely "chick lit," reading this book was a completely different experience. A Vintage Affair contains the best elements of what women's literature offers; there's a little mystery, some romance, quirky characters, and an unresolved crisis, but wrapped in a story that was just delightful.
Wolff's well-researched and beautifully written descriptions of vintage couture, from cupcake dresses to clutch purses, made reading this book a pleasure. It was easy to lose myself in Phoebe and her supporting cast - the mystery surrounding an elderly client with a difficult past, Phoebe's romance with a widowed father, and Phoebe's parents, who have their own challenges- and while the writing was sometimes predictable, the story never grew stale. I finished A Vintage Affair within two days, with that satisfied feeling you get after a good meal or a nice long nap.
Not every book has to be groundbreaking, and it certainly doesn't have to be "literature" to be a good read. But every book should in some way entertain and enrich us, the readers, no matter under what category the book falls.
