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 by Lisa Becker 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.
Rating:
***** Five Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate
word count: 50-55,000 words
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