Love is all you need

Oh, man. I really wanted to impress you guys with my first review after being AWOL for so long. I wanted to say something DEEP and PROFOUND about a CLASSIC and remind you about how witty and sparkling and INTELLIGENT I am. And I did read classics while I was on maternity leave! I did! I nursed Lulu and I read Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and I mentally planned an entry about how Joyce was actually not as bad as I always thought and how maybe next time I decide to read him for the first time, I will not start with Finnegan's Wake and that will make all the difference.

But here I am, and my first review back is going to be of a chick-lit novel. Of course.

(That is, if the term "chick lit" still exists. Does it? I haven't heard anybody use it in ages. When I picked up Sarah Pekkanen's latest, a few months ago, it was touted as "women's fiction," which makes me think of Nora Roberts and those Lifetime movies where menopausal women save their sons from murderous golddigger daughters-in-law. I almost didn't pick it up until I remembered I had read S.P.'s first book and that it was chick lit, only with brain tumors. Is that the difference? Chick lit = shoes, and women's fiction = shoes and tumors? Someone has to school me on the terminology because I'm obviously out of touch.)

Anyway, Evans has written some chicklitty stuff in the past, and yes, her latest, Love Always, does have the required elements of the genre--romance, fashion, a down-on-her luck heroine who makes good. But it also features a family torn apart by disloyalty, echoes of racism, and a life cut short by a tragic accident. If calling it "women's fiction" will make more people read it, then I'm in. This is a book that deserves to be read.

The plot goes like this: Natasha Kapoor (newly separated from her husband and about to lose her jewelry-design business) returns to Summercove, her family's home in Cornwall, for her grandmother's funeral, and finds the schoolgirl diary of her aunt Cecily, who died in an accident in 1963, the summer she was 15. There are rumors that Natasha's mother, Miranda, was involved in Cecily's death, and so Natasha starts to read Cecily's diary hoping to find something in it that will reveal the truth of the matter and clear her mother's name.

At first, Cecily's journal reveals nothing but her hopes for the upcoming school term, her thoughts on the ongoing Profumo affair, and her disdain for the Beatles. But as Summercove fills with summer guests--the Kapoor childrens' cousins and their friends, the handsome Leighton brothers--tensions begin to mount and family secrets begin to spill out. And Natasha, who hoped to find answers in Cecily's words, discovers only more questions--this time, about her identity and her place within a family struggling to define itself.

Evans gives a sense of the 1960s without forcing it, without the seams showing, unlike in a lot of less-meticulously researched novels that dabble in historical fiction. And in Cecily, she has created a truly charming character. So charming that I must admit that Natasha's story kind of paled in comparison to Cecily's. I liked Natasha very much, but I sometimes found myself turning the pages to get back to that vibrant voice. By the end of the novel, I was so in love with the piquant, insightful Cecily that there was a true sense of loss over her death.

One of the other striking things about this book was the way in which Evans treated the issue of racism. The tension between the biracial Kapoor children and their white cousins, the darker-skinned Miranda's resentment of her sister and violence against the girls at school who taunt her feel like dangerous currents running underneath the story. Tackling these issues at all sets Evans's work far apart from her chick-lit colleagues; the fact that she does it so well, though, is something that a writer in any genre could be proud of.

This book is recommended for all the chick-lit readers who ever wished that Becky Bloomwood was smart or that Jennifer Weiner stopped phoning it in or for anybody who wants a plain old good book in which to lose a few hours. Fair warning, though: Evans's descriptions of the lush Cornwall coast will make you wish for summer. And judging by today's October snowstorm, that's a long way off, indeed, for those of us in the Northern hemisphere. You Ozzie readers--I'm jealous of you! Because the only thing that would have made my experience of this book better, in my opinion, would have been a beach to read it by.

If chick lit does still exist, this is what it should be like. This is the high-water mark, guys.