Melissa Bank's first book, The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, is one of my favorites. It was just witty and cute and honest and funny and I liked the protagonist, Jane, a lot. (They're making a movie based on the book starring Sarah Michelle Gellar but I'm kind of not hopeful for that. I love SMG and all but I don't know if she's really right for the role...we'll see.)
Anyway, after 6 years, Bank finally wrote another book, The Wonder Spot. It's been out for quite some time now, but I hadn't gotten around to it until now. I was at Borders the other day, on impulse I decided to buy it. I was thinking I would love it, but I don't know, I kind of didn't. It's almost too similar to the Girl's Guide, with the novel sectioned off into short stories the same way, starting off with the main character as a teenager and spanning twenty years or so. But somehow it didn't quite work as well for me. The main character, Sophie, is supposed to represent the average woman, I guess, but I found her underachiever-ness to just be unrelatable. Not to say that I'm super ambitious and know exactly what I want, but to me Sophie was just hapless. She seemed to only be half-heartedly trying to find her career and love and all that. (Bridget Jones was hapless too, but what was endearing about her was that she was sincere and always trying.) By the end of this book, there was still no hint of what Sophie really wanted.
The subject matter of the stories was sometimes kind of off as well. There's this one story where she's graduated college and is basically just staying with various relatives in New York City teaching herself to type so she can get a job. I found this to be kind of strange basis for a story. I mean, there was other stuff going on, but I really just wanted to yell at her to take a typing class. Sophie also has a different boyfriend in every story, none of which I'm sure we're supposed to really care about, and by the end of the book we still don't know if she's found more than just another fling.
Don't get me wrong, there were still a ton of great things about the book, they were just the same things that were great about the Girl's Guide and I guess I was sort of looking for something new to go along with those things.
There's apparently a slight controversy surrounding this book and a somewhat scathing review Curtis Sittenfeld (author of Prep) wrote for the New York Times. Sittenfeld starts off the article saying that calling a book "chick lit" is sort of like calling another woman a slut but that she can't help but call The Wonder Spot chick lit. Ouch! I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with chick lit, but I also don't think this book really falls under that label. Chick Lit is like...Meg Cabot. The Wonder Spot is a lot less silly. And no, maybe it's not as "intellectual" as Prep, but it has its own merits, and in my opinion, its own problems that don't really have anything to do with it being chick lit.
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