Monday, June 10, 2013

Click: An Online Love Story / Lisa Becker


Reviewed by: BigAl

Genre: Chick- Lit

Approximate word count: 50-55,000 words

Availability    
Kindle  US: YES  UK: YES  Nook: YES  Smashwords: NO  Paper: YES
Click on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords store

Author:

“Lisa Becker had endured her share of hilarious and heinous cyber dates, many of which inspired Click: An Online Love Story. She is now happily married to a wonderful man she met online and lives in Manhattan Beach [California] with him and their two daughters.”

Description:

“Fast approaching her 30th birthday and finding herself not married, not dating, and without even a prospect or a house full of cats, Renee Greene, the heroine of Click: An Online Love Story, reluctantly joins her best guy pal on a journey to find love online in Los Angeles.

The story unfolds through a series of emails between Renee and her best friends (anal-compulsive Mark, the overly-judgmental Ashley and the over-sexed Shelley) as well as the gentlemen suitors she meets online. From the guy who starts every story with ‘My buddies and I were out drinking one night,’ to the egotistical ‘B’ celebrity looking for someone to stroke his ego, Renee endures her share of hilarious and heinous cyber dates. Fraught with BCC's, FWD's, and inadvertent Reply to All's, readers will root for Renee to ‘click’ with the right man.”

Appraisal:

Click has a couple things in its premise that are guaranteed to grab my attention and, if done right, suck me into the story. One of those is building the story around computers in almost any way, but especially how our interactions are different with each other because of computer technology. This book does that in two ways, with computer dating and being made up entirely of emails between the protagonist, Renee, and her best friends. The last might spook lovers of dialogue or the flipside, haters of extended narration (and I’d put myself in the last group), but Becker managed to not trip any of my triggers in this regard. That she managed to slip in this joke that appealed to both my computer-geek and language-nerd sides was also a mark in the book’s favor:

I’m not certain I want to be with a man that even knows what a UNIX system is. But, I guess UNIX is better than Eunuchs. Ha! Ha! Okay, obviously this situation is making me a bit uncomfortable and as a result I’ve resorted to homonym humor.

Renee’s experience reminded me of Beth Orsoff’s book, Romantically Challenged, which is one of my favorite chick-lit books, in that she had to date a lot of frogs before she found a potential prince. And this was the second big attention grabber for me. As with Orsoff’s book, it gave me a chance to compare myself to the frogs and usually (okay, sometimes) come out okay in the comparison. But for the main target audience (which I’m not), you might find Renee’s experiences familiar and everyone will find them funny. I found that once I started reading this book I had a hard time putting it down and although it ties the story up nicely at the end, I wanted to know more about what happened to the characters afterward. Luckily, the sequel Double Click was queued up on my Kindle, so I was able to jump right in.

FYI:

Limited adult language and situations.

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues


Rating: ***** Five stars

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