Book: American Girls About Town
Authors: various
Published: 2004 (Simon and Shuster)
Pages: 385
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS WHO CARES. This is my general attitude
toward romance novels, and it was not proven wrong by this collection of short
stories. Which this Reader thought might provide enough variety in short
snippets to sort of lopsidedly even out the overall quality.
But I can’t even figure out the premise of this collection.
Is it about American girls abroad, or abroad girls in America, or girls of
indeterminate nationality just boppin’ around their own countries, in which
case why even bring America into it in the first place – because there are
examples of all of these, and setting rarely has anything to do with anything.
One of the stories is the extraordinarily shallow, bitchy
inner monologue of a lady in yoga class who meets her boyfriend for lunch
afterwards and he gives her a yoga-themed anklet. That’s IT. Like, I’m pretty
sure it was set in LA, but I don’t even have any textual evidence for that
except they do a lot of yoga in LA, right?
I guess it’s really because they’re all by American lady
authors, but that brings up problems of its own. …Which I’ve just forgotten. Because
none of the stories convince me that they matter or go into the uniqueness of
their romances. The only way to describe all the clichés here is to resort to
cliché myself, so I’m going to donate it.
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