OK, this one really is chick-lit. I happen to like chick-lit, but then I'm a secure male. Deal.

A favorite theme of chick-lit is the heroine's search for a mate. I will forgive your lack of amazement.

The thing that impressed me most with this particular book is the range of feelings I had for the protagonist, Anju. At the beginning of the book, I liked her a lot, and she coasted on that until sometime in the middle, when she began to annoy me, and toward the end I had no use for her at all, and finished the last page and closed the book feeling sorry for her and wishing her well. I know what you're thinking, and yes, we've all had relationships like that with protagonists in real life, and yes, it was kind of interesting having such a relationship with a book character, in fact, that's one of the reasons I wanted to write about it.

Anju is a twenty-something New York fashion publicist who wants to go back home to her parents in Mumbai and have a traditional arranged marriage.

So right off you know this is one conflicted character, but she seems likeable enough, you make excuses for youth, for this, for that, but at some point, you begin to lose patience. Anju doesn't know what she wants. All the reality of traditional life in her family milieu drives her nuts, she only feels good in New York, but she continues to cling to this notion that only a man can validate her self-esteem, and preferably a man of whom her parents will approve.

By the time the book is half over (or sooner), you have come to realize that Anju is a superficial, shallow snob, who feels good in New York for all the wrong reasons, just as she wants to get married for all the wrong reasons, and this is made even more frustrating for the reader because she keeps walking right through all the right reasons for both and tossing them aside in favor of her extensive collection of wrong reasons.

As she recounts to you lesson after lesson that should snap her out of it, and you keep waiting for her to have her epiphany and grow up, and she doesn't, you give up on her. By the time she has the closest thing to an epiphany she is going to have, about the best you can muster is a weak smear of pity, and your strongest emotion is an urgent hope that the book is not autobiographical.