You can't judge a chick lit from its cover

Aggh, lots of chick lit read but less written by me about it. This will change, I hope. After all, I'm now going to be 30 in less than a month - my official cut-off point for this project - and I still feel I've just gently caressed the surface of chick lit. So something of a slight filler post here, directly related to the surface of chick lit - their covers.

Right at the start of this blog part of my definition of what made a chick lit novel was the pastel cover and the swirly writing. It wasn't something I ever wanted to be seen carrying around (incidentally all my tube based shame has vanished - I've been proudly waving around a bright pink, sparkly copy of Divas Las Vegas all week). Anyway, the Bookseller a couple of weeks ago featured a write-up of a 'cover design conference' at which Fiona Curran, design director at Williams Murry Hamm, criticised the covers of chick lit for being overly formulaic: pink script type, pastel colours and a girlie illustration. In her honour you may have noticed I've changed the colours of this blog to her stated combo (anyone want to draw a picture of me, martini glass in one hand, pink book in the other to go with it?). Here's the example she used:

Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella

Encore Valentine by Adriana Trigiani

You can see her point. Oh look, pink + pastel + pretty woman on the front in a dress = GIRLS book. It's quite boring and depressing and patronising. 

The instance that really annoyed me is when a while back they decided to remarket Jane Austen as chick lit. Here's Persuasion. Spot the difference, eh? 

When they first did this what really annoyed me was that I felt they had reduced Austen to chick lit turf. That was what lots of people dismissed her as and this new cover merely shoved her further into that genre. It gave no clue to how witty, clever or interesting she really is. Now, after my explorations into chick lit, what annoys me is that they do that with all the books. Here are the covers of three different authors, three different stories and yet they are all marketed the same. 

At the same conference, David Wardle, founder of Designbydavid, said of a different genre 'To design them in such a unified format seems to devalue the content and the individual form.'

Exactly. The truth is that people do judge a book by its cover, so can we have a more diverse and range of chick lit designs please? It's just possible the readership might follow and get a bit more diverse too...

Confessions of a Shopaholic

Okay, so time for a key book in the world of chick lit: Confessions of a Shopaholic (or The Secret Dream World of a Shopaholic as it was known in the UK before being repackaged for the film).

Now, much more than my initial problem with Jane Green and my subsequent problems in discovering I enjoyed some Jane Green, I found Shopaholic very confusing.

On one hand this was a very funny book. It made me laugh out loud and the character was the one I could most strongly imagine out of the (admittedly limited) chick lit novels I'd read.

On the other, the whole story line and ending sucked.

So, first, the funny bits. Becky Bloomwood is a scatty London financial journalist who dreams of working on a glossy. She shops like she works for a glossy too, spending massively beyond her means. In the aim to cut costs, she visits a museum and, of course, gets waylaid in the museum shop. In the aim to save on takeaways, she ends up buying out John Lewis restocking the kitchen. It's all really obvious stuff but Sophie Kinsella writes it well, capturing Becky's knack for self justification and twisting the truth. In fact, her voice is so distinctive, I alarmingly found myself taking on her voice in my own internal monologue too: 'Should I eat another piece of chocolate? Well, I am going to run home today. Actually my foot hurts, maybe I should go to the gym instead and better eat some more chocolate to cure it. Oh I'm too full of chocolate to go to the gym.' etc, etc. Now, I say that is funny but typing it out just makes me sound like I'm having one of those overly neurotic conversations you sometimes hear on the tube between girls who list, in painful detail, how they've cut all diary and meat out of their diet and are running six miles every morning before yoga. That's because Becky Bloomwood is that kind of girl, Kinsella is just a lot better at making that sound funny than me.

And then the annoying bit. Becky is obviously quite dim and rubbish at her job. Yet somehow, the boss of a major financial PR company falls in love with her and she gets a job advising on finances on the telly. Meaning her debts are magically repaid. Yep, she gets the dream job and the dream guy. I really resent this Bridget Jones (though I love the book)/Legally Blonde school of thought that out of the mouths of idiots comes wisdom. Out of the mouths of these babes surely only comes quotes from Cosmopolitan or the Metro and it seems very wrong to suggest playing dumb is a way to get your fairytale ending. The over consumption she indulges in doesn't seem glamorous, it just seems sickening.  

There are four more books in this franchise (and one more to follow in September). I'm not sure how this plot can or will develop - although there are obvious clues in the titles Shopaholic Ties the Knot and Shopaholic and Baby.  Perhaps I'll revisit, time first for some Marian Keyes.

Charity chick lit

Well, I've finished the Jane Green. I'll try and write some thoughts about it later in the week. I'm also going to have to have a brief pause while I read the novel for my book club next week (Junk by Melvin Burgess). Before then I decided to go to my local charity shop and pick up a few more titles on the cheap. I have to say pickings weren't good - they seemed to focus more on the 'yummy mummy' side of the genre, rather than the twenty-something world I want to explore. However, I did invest the princely sum of £1.95 in each of these books, selected on their covers and blurbs alone:

Behaving Like Adults by Anna Maxted: 'Will Holly discover what she really wants and needs?'

The True and Outstanding Adventure of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson: 'Fired by her boss, dumped by her boyfriend, getting old by the minute, what's there to live for?'

I also came back and invested in a second hand copy of the following because, in the words of my academic friend, 'I feel it's important':

Junk first, then I think it's time to shop...