2nd Read Rating: 3.5 StarsI had to read this book a second time and review it to defend my honor. Someone, Karla who shall remain nameless, was trolling on my old ratings and poked fun at my chick lit past. I believe this person called me a "chick lit Hoover". It was a fun chat. So, yeah. BAVR used to read chick lit. Point and laugh all you want. I regret very little in my life except for the tremendously generous ratings I handed out when I first joined the site. You see, when I signed up for GR, they told me they could generate recommendations by having me rate a bunch of titles they splashed up on the screen. Like a good little soldier, I clicked through pages of books, and I swear to god that a majority of the books on those pages were chick lit. And I was like, "Yeah, I read them," because I'm not fucking DEAD. You can't walk into a book store without seeing some brightly covered book about shoes or credit cards or working a trendy job in NYC while wearing shoes and using credit cards. In the excitement of signing up for this awesome site (Hi, Goodreads!), I basically gave 5 stars to stuff that I tolerated (like this) and 1 star to stuff that I wanted to die in a fire (like the Twilight series). It worked, didn't it? I eventually found a group of book sluts just like me, and we're currently living happily ever after.
But yeah, the 5 star thing is a bit much.
Sue me.
In Queen of Babble Gets Hitched, narrator Lizzie is ob-fucking-SESSED with weddings. In the two previous books, she met her boyfriend at a wedding, dumped him because he didn't want a wedding, and basically talked about weddings the way that creepy guy waiting in line next to you at the grocery store won't stop telling you about his personal life. I don't understand what it is about chick lit that makes the heroines act like goddamn psychos, but it always seems like weddings turn perfectly reasonable, successful women into this:
It's the corsets, right? The corsets block the air from reaching the brain.
The opening of the book presents Lizzie in full-on panic mode. After the ex-boyfriend, Luke, crawls back to her at the end of Book 2 and PROPOSES, Lizzie now has to get his best friend Chaz out of her bed after their drunken make-out the night before. But Chaz doesn't want to go because he thinks that he's the perfect man for Lizzie. Also, no one thinks Lizzie should marry Luke because the only things she seems to like about him are his looks and the fact that he talks about maybe being a doctor to save little kids someday. Word to the wise, NEVER trust a man who talks in "somedays". He will disappoint you 95% of the time. As her feelings deepen for Chaz, Lizzie's left with quite a conundrum. Can she really date a guy who wears khaki shorts and baseball caps? (If you live in MY hometown, you can, snob.) Oh, and one more thing: Chaz doesn't believe in the institution of marriage.
Chaz has a fair point.
So you see where this is going. Nothing crazy happens, but the writing and characters are charming, and the book is easy to read. I still like that Lizzie chooses the beta in the end. I'm a bit of a beta whore when the occasion calls for it. They never seem to come out on top in these books, and I like an underdog. Lizzie's Gram is a real delight, too. I love it when old people lose all social filters and start saying everything that comes to their warped minds. Unless the old people are bothering me at work. Then I want them to go away.
Not a 5 star to me any longer, but there's nothing BAD about this book. Would I buy something with its description today? No. But my walk down memory lane was a nice enough for 3.5 stars.
Note: I didn't change my initial star rating because fucking with the overall rating seems unfair to me.
