03 August 2006

The Single Life

The Single Life by Kate McKeeverDelaney Morgan is a low-on-the-totum-pole journilist, covering the obits on the Atlanta Globe. She is excited when the offer comes for her to do a column on the dating life, thinking that she's finally going to get her byline. Her excitement fades when she learns that she is not only sharing the column's authorship with a senior newswriter, but starring in it as well.

Grant Stone, senior newswriter turned date babysitter, is by no means happy to be a part of this new column "The Single Life". His only hope is to find a new job somewhere else, preferably as far away from Atlanta as possible on the same paper. Delaney knows Grant from her internship and finds him attractive and cockey, and has no desire to date with him watching, let alone have him sharing her byline. She's ready to call it quits with the column until he suggests the same. She then becomes determined to make the colomun as success with or without him--hopefully without!

To the surprise of both, the column turns out to not only be interesting and fun to them, but hugely popular to the readers. As Delaney lives (and lives to writes about) all aspects of the dating scene from matchmaking to internet dating to the bar scene, Grant tags along to write it from his point of view--what the guy did wrong, what women want, what guys want. As the column contineus, they form a friendly partnership, laughing over disaterous first dates, trying out the new host led "fast dating" group event together and strongly disagreeing about second date material. But, at the same time, Delaney secretly finds herself wishing her date was Grant while unbeknownst to her, he finds himself strangely protective of Delaney and strongly disliking all her dates.

My only quibble with the auther is that I would like to have known more about Delaney's internship with Grant, which is only hinted at, and to have seen the reasoning behind the city editor's choice of Delaney for the column. His reasoning for choosing Grant is hinted at, by his strong dislike of Grant, but it would have been interesting to see more about the choice process. Also, I really enjoyed the hilarious dating stories and wish Ms. McKeever had included more. There weren't nearly enough!

Overall, The Single Life is a light-hearted, enjoyable romance that will appeal to anyone who has ever had that horrible first date but is not so sweetly (read annoyingly) romantic that those of us who aren't as keen on the romance novel genre will still be able to appreciate it for the humor and over-all good writing.

1 Comments:

Blogger GW said...

That sounds like a fun read! Right now I'm reading Imraan Coovadia's first novel, The Wedding. It's a love story told by the grandson of the couple, telling about his Indian parents' unlikely meeting and marriage. It takes place in post-colonial India and is peppered with clever and interesting characters. It's very funny, but at the same time quite touching.

4:24 PM  

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