The Gift

One of my favorite “Chick Lit” authors is Cecelia Ahern. I read Chick Lit semi often just because I can blast through those pages like lightning and it’s a fabulous escape. It’s sort of like watching a sitcom on TV- just a distraction from the real world purely for the sake of being entertained. As long as there’s something more than just shoes, shopping, and sex in the plot of a girlie book, I usually enjoy it. Of course, finding quickie reads in the Chick Lit section that contain more plot elements than just shoes, shopping, and sex is pretty difficult since for some reason female authors think those three things all by themselves make up a riveting story… and I digress.

So enter Cecelia Ahern, because when it comes to Chick Lit, she’s pretty fresh. She writes very creative stories. Her characters are well thought out and believable. I haven’t yet found a *ahem* love scene that lasts more than a paragraph. Plus, she’s a very young woman and that tickles me a bit, because I’m sure that half of the things she writes about she hasn’t even come close to experiencing in her so-far short life. Her first novel was about a woman who had been married for 15 (ish? I can’t remember how long) years, had just lost her husband, and was probably one of the most believable characters I’ve ever read in a chick book. Watching this young author develop that character was sort of the equivalent to watching 16-year-old LeeAnn Rimes sing “How Can I Live Without You”… only Ahern actually pulled that character off and was a LOT less annoying. And I digress again.

So! I just finished The Gift, a book I got from the library because all the Christmas readers had finally returned it. Yep, it’s a Christmas book. Yep, it’s chickie. Yep, it’s got a moral. Yep, it’s basically It’s a Wonderful Life meets Tuesdays With Morrie meets Eat Pray Love. Yep, we’re supposed to read it around Christmas time so that we remember what we have, understand the true gifts of both the season and life, change our way of thinking, become all around better people, blah, blah, blaaaaahhhhh… Yep, it was still an entertaining book and whadevah, it was a good time-killer. This one is not going to win a Pulitzer, but every author (apparently) has to write themselves a nice little seasonal lesson-learner, so I’ll give Ahern hers. As long as she goes back to writing the usual distracting non-moral-preaching stuff soon. Please. More story. Less preaching. (And yes, Cecelia… I did know exactly how it was going to end within the first ten pages, but you did mean for that to happen, yes? This wasn’t exactly Hercule Poirot…)