SLIM TO NONE

SLIM TO NONE by Jenny Gardiner is a light, humorous slice of gingerbread with whipped cream topping.

Not really. The food and recipes I salivated over throughout my reading brought up this metaphor, but it's still pretty apt. Not quite chick lit and not quite women's fiction, this kind of straddles the two.

Abbie, the overweight heroine, loses her job as a newspaper food critic because she's gotten so fat the restaurant owners recognize her. The editor puts her on a temporary part-time column and gives her an ultimatum: lose weight or forfeit her job.

Perfect. Especially since the sleazy food-section guy (who she thought was so nice because every day he brings her pastries and other exotic confections guaranteed to add the pounds) is filling in at her job!

Now Abbie not only has to lose the pounds to wrest her job away from her stand-in who wants to become permanent, she also has to deal with a husband who wants her to ride on a Vespa, a homeless man she wants to take under her wing, and a best friend who wants to use her to cover an affair.

And this brings her to having to face her own past and the reason she hankers after food so much.

Everyone who's been overweight will get a kick out of this book. No earthshattering problems but lots of funny situations.

But avoid the recipes like the plague.

SAVING CEECEE HONEYCUTT

It's been too cold to get out. The only thing good about the weather is that it gives me a great excuse for reading. Hurray for the weather!!!

So I just finished SAVING CEECEE HONEYCUTT by Beth Hoffman and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Some might think it a rather fluffy book. While a lot of incidents in CeeCee's mentally disturbed mother's life are recounted, they're glossed over. Which is fine with me. I don't like wallowing in depression and mental illness.

But once CeeCee's mother dies and she's sent to live with a great aunt in Savannah, her life seems to be one long fairy tale. Or a least a series of interesting vignettes. Not much happens as she struggles to blend in with her new family and quirky neighbors. (One bathes in an outside bathtub; one is having an affair with a law enforcement man and slips on a slug during a carousal and is concussed and has to go to the hospital sans clothes.)

It's nice southern fiction. No magical realism, just plain speaking. But the thing that sets it apart is the voice. As you read, you can hear the twelve-year-old CeeCee talking. You even think you know her.

And that's what makes this a really good read.

ELIN HILDERBRAND

I think it was Laura???? who said she enjoyed this author so I got SUMMER PEOPLE and read it this past weekend.

While I like women's fiction okay, I prefer something that has a tight plot. This story was more of a woman trying to find herself, detailing her family's travails along the way, and wasn't terribly interesting to me. Others will probably love it.

But I think there were two reasons the book didn't work for me. The story about a family's grief for a dead husband and father, was too realistic; I read fiction to escape real life, not depress myself further. And the writer in me kept noticing craft details like changes of POV all over the place that had me rereading whole paragraphs to figure out why they seemed disjointed.

Overall, it was a nice enough story but not one I'd read again.

And you can't ever tell what other books by the same author are like. I didn't like Nora Roberts for years because so many of her books read like standard romances. Then I read one that seemed like another person had written it because the voice stood out so sharply. In all, there were 3-4 in this voice and I liked them.

So my taste depends a lot on the voice. But I still want an interesting plot, too. I guess that's why I'm into mysteries so much right now. Some of them have great voices and intriguing plots.

Anybody else have a book or author they want to recommend?