Kensington, $6.99, ISBN 978-0-7582-0371-7
Contemporary Fiction, 2007
How annoying. Ginny Blue’s Boyfriends is marketed as a contemporary romance when it is actually a mass market paperback edition of a chick-lit book that was published back in 2005. Those were the days when every other author fancies herself a chick-lit author. Since then, Nancy Kelly has reinvented herself as Nancy Bush, having hopped from the Helen Fielding bandwagon onto the Janet Evanovich bandwagon, so I have no idea why someone thinks it’s a great idea to dig this book up from the cemetery of a fad that was beyond flogged to death. Maybe they need to dig out the graves to make room for fair-weather authors of paranormal romances.
Ginny Blue’s Boyfriends is a tired and formulaic chick-lit story featuring Victoria “Ginny” Bluebell and an ensemble cast of female stereotypes. You’ve read everything before, I’m sure: mother issues, clothes issues, men issues. Ginny decides to seek out and reconnect with old boyfriends, each with a charming nickname bestowed by Ginny, to figure out what is wrong with her love life. The Mr Right, Jackson Wright (snort), is the first guy she gets naked with but it will take over three hundred pages of interminable whining and moaning for her to get there with Jackson again for the happy ending.
A part of me is in awe with how the women in this story may hold jobs but they have the luxury of spending their entire waking hour obsessed about finding a husband. When they are not over-analyzing everything about men in the most stupid manner possible, they are bitching to each other about men. But the time I am done with this interminably insipid catalog of Sex in the City clichés, I feel like a walking dead myself.
Come on guys, let the past go. Please stop passing off shoddy examples of unimaginative bandwagon-jumping fluff like Ginny Blue’s Boyfriends as “contemporary romance” and fool me into giving away my $6.99. I get angry when that happens. I’m not nice when I am angry, so let just keep all the embarrassing evidences of a publishing trend that was murdered by out-of-control greed and lack of quality control in the not-so-distant past, shall we?
