This is Chick Lit

This is Chick Lit is a short story anthology published in response to the anthology This is Not Chick Lit, which claimed that chick lit is basically a waste of trees. I found the first anthology to be quite dull and most of the stories utterly pointless. (review: http://bookwormsarah.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-is-not-chick-lit.html)

While the book This is Not Chick Lit failed to make its claims sound reasonable, This is Chick Lit definitely showed that Chick Lit can have some importance. I've noticed that most Chick Lit focuses on one seemingly petty event throughout the whole book and then has an ending that tries to be emotional. Reading Chick Lit short stories was different. There was no time for rambling. The emotion wasn't held off until the end. I found the Chick Lit in short stories is better than reading the entire novel because with short stories, everything has to be good.

At the beginning of each story, the author of that particular story writes a little blurb about what Chick Lit means to them. This makes it so that the whole book seems like an argument. Yes, the book was published to fire back at This is Not Chick Lit, but sometimes I found the debate to be a little too aggressive in this book. The entire first short story was about two women who didn't like each other because of their conflicting viewpoints on Chick Lit.

If you ignore all the arguing in this book, you may notice that the stories are a bit different. Instead of just reading Chick Lit just for the sake of it, you may notice that this anthology is a celebration of Chick Lit. Each one of the authors had some point to make with their short story. It wasn't all fluff with this book, although there is plenty of that.

Grade: B+