Boy Meets Girl by Meg Cabot

Okay, fine readers (all what, four of you? Or am I being over-generous?), I've told you some lies. I said that having finished the Elle books it would be back to business as usual, but now I've gone and read some chick lit which is hardly usual. Nonetheless, it's been so long since I've actually talked about a book here in my book blog, I figured it couldn't hurt to post about my most recent read. Besides, I really needed some brain candy (after the aforementioned book lacking indication of dialogue), and despite it's shortfalls in the great literary scheme of things, Boy Meets Girl is nothing if not great mind candy.

Kate MacKenzie's life is kind of sucking. She just broke up with the only guy she's ever been with, her loser boyfriend Dale, who despite being with Kate for some 10 years can't muster a real committment. Now she's living on her best friend's couch and working as a Human Resources Rep for a Tyrannical Office Despot (T.O.D.). If all that isn't bad enough, Kate has to fire the lovable Mrs. Lopez, her office's dessert-maker who happens to have some rigid moral concerns about who is worthy of her desserts. When she's involved in Mrs. Lopez's wrongful termination lawsuit she finds herself falling in love (lust?) with the company's despicable (or is he?) lawyer.

Though the book is told entirely through e-mail, voice mail messages, notes written on receipts, journal entries, and the like, Cabot manages to use these things to help you get to know and love her characters (or hate them, as required for some, of course). Sure the characters are exaggerated...the good ones very, very good and the bad ones quite absurdly miserable, but Kate and her foibles are laugh out loud funny. It's pretty obvious how things will turn out, but that doesn't keep you from rooting for her as she struggles to act like a normal person in front of the guy she likes, deal with the T.O.D., and find an affordable apartment in Manhattan not on the same block as a methadone clinic. Some of it definitely reminded me of myself - hunting for jobs ("I didn't go to college to file all day... I should have been an electrician!"), hunting for apartments that don't suck that won't suck my bank account dry (first month, last month, AND security deposit?), and who can't relate to feeling like you look like a blithering idiot in front of the person you're most trying to impress (Uh...right?)? All in all - a ridiculous but lovable tale that kept me laughing and that I could read in the length of day. Just what I needed!

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