The Opposite of Me, Sarah Pekkanen’s debut novel, was one of those books I wanted to like but was worried I wouldn’t. The conclusion seemed so obvious: workaholic less-pretty twin Lindsey Rose is fired from her New York City advertising job and moves to her childhood home (and Pekkanen’s current home) in Bethesda, MD, where [...]

Long before Robyn Okrant began Living Oprah, author Cathy Alter used the wisdom of the almighty O – and 13 other women’s glossies – to fix her shipwrecked life.  At age 37, Cathy was working a toxic job, eating her lunch out of vending machines, severely in debt and partying recklessly, all while cavorting with [...]

 
This is how busy Andrea Rodgers is: Not only do I review the newish books that publishers send to us occasionally, but I also review the books she has had on her shelves and hasn’t managed to get to yet. Which is how I came to be reviewing Candace Bushnell’s novel, Lipstick Jungle, a year [...]

For the past four months, I’ve been obsessed with an internet “chick lit” book about divorce. It’s ok, though, because with Dahlia Lithwick of Slate as the author, it has liberal intellectual cred.
Lithwick’s usual job for Slate is covering the Supreme Court, but editor David Plotz has all these newfangled ideas about using the internet [...]

Since The Lovely Bones will be released on film soon (January 15, 2010, according to IMDB), I though I would re-read Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones in order to, well. Ruin the film for me, probably. I had to stop re-reading Harry Potter books before the movie launches, because it made the movies impossibly [...]

Emily Giffin lived across the hall from Miss A at Wake Forest and is now a star of chick lit. It’s easy to see why. In Baby Proof, she takes a simple concept (What if one partner in a “child-free by choice” couple had a change of heart?) and keeps it going for an entire [...]

The following are books that I hope to read in the last week of 2009 and the first few months of 2010. Add them to your holiday wishlist, too! You can also just read The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009 . . . I sure did.
1. The Art Student’s War, by Brad [...]

 
If you want a good basic understanding of the economic collapse, skip Wikipedia and read Tatiana Boncompagni’s Hedge Fund Wives; where the novel is weak on emotional heft, it’s strong on research.
Boncompagni has worked as a journalist, and it shows. Hedge Fund Wives, her second published novel, is at times heavy on the “telling” and [...]

 
Tennyson is a beautiful little novel. It has everything you could ask for in a book for young adults; history, emotional development, action, humor, and metaphor.
Branded as a Southern Gothic tale, Tennyson muses over the tangible details of Mississippi and Louisiana; the plants, the heat, the bugs, the tired and weary buildings. But what Tennyson [...]

 
FTC note: Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, sent a copy of this book to AskMissA.com for review back in the spring.
Much to Your Chagrin: A Memoir of Embarrassment by Suzanne Guillette might be cursed. I found myself doing many embarrassing things while reading it; mostly embarrassments of agility, occasional embarrassments of judgment, and [...]