By Jane Green
Cath, the British narrator of Bookends, is a graduate of the anti-Sex and the City school of comedic heroines: The kind who, frustrated by dating, is more likely to become best friends with Sara Lee. "I'm sprawled on the sofa, one leg flung over the back," she says of a typical night in, "cramming soft rice cakes topped with plastic-effect cheese and a healthy dollop of hummus (scooped from the tub by my finger)."
Couch potato though she may be, Cath can't escape the frazzled antics that Green, a native Londoner who lives in the U.S., regularly puts her single-gal heroines through. In this, her fifth novel, as in the bestselling Jemima J, Green gives readers a lovably imperfect protagonist, a heart-to-heart narrative voice and a bumpy, error-strewn highway to romance. After unspooling a decade's worth of entanglements between Cath and her friends, Green takes a surprisingly serious turn into issues of mortality and infidelity. By then readers should care about much more than whether Cath gets her man. (Broadway, $21)
Bottom Line: Pluck it off the shelf
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