I had heard good things about this particular bit of chick lit, so when I was browsing Half-Price Books and picking up things at random I added this to the stack.
Took it home and finished it in the same afternoon. Heavy reading it's not.
This isn't a novel, although it appears that some of the reviewers are confused on this point. It's a series of short stories, many of which were previously published in magazines and such, all about the same character.
Jane starts out as a know-it-all teen, and moves through college, failed relationships, failed jobs, death, cancer and mid-20s crisis to end up at some sort of a happy ending. She's sitcom witty and literary minded -- to the point that it was at times unrealistic. No one is this smart and well-spoken *all* the time.
Jane also has the wealthy, white, East Coast background that I saw in so many books and magazines when I was a teenager. She reminds me of the impossibly perfect yet adorably flawed girls I saw in Seventeen when I was growing up. I didn't identify with them any more than I identified with Jane.
A world of summers at the Cape, dinners after Broadway and weekends in the Caribbean is foreign to me. Maybe someone does really live like that.
The writing was good, although I did feel that Banks tried too hard sometimes. "You're drinking gasoline to stay warm," has punk grrrl style, but without the music to back it up. It should be a song lyric, not a sentence.
Not a bad read overall, but not one I'd go out of my way for.
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