Genre:
Chick-Lit
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.”
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.”
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.
Added
for Reprise Review: Click: An
Online Love Story
was a nominee in the Chick Lit/Women's Fiction category for B&P
2014 Readers' Choice Awards. Original review ran June 10, 2013.
Format/Typo
Issues:
No
significant issues
Approximate
word count: 50-55,000 words
Rating:
***** Five stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
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