Here is the way genre master Jennifer Weiner describes Chick Lit: "A smart-yet-wounded female heroine, who's young (ish), accomplished but insecure, dealing with (pick one) body image woes, romantic misery, a dysfunctional family or a tyrannical boss, trying to find her way in life. They're sort of late-stage coming-of-age stories."
 

Well, Connie Gotsch has joined the other masters of the genre with this pert story of girl-under-the-thumb getting loose from an overbearing boss and loveless life. Shelby McCoy struggles with the fears of past trauma as a journalist as she takes a new job to get back to her first love of vocation, photo-journalism. At the same time she secretly harbors smoldering love for another in the profession, Benjamin Kieth, a desirable hunk who is determined not to fully commit to any woman.
 

Raise the stakes of this combination by placing them in the midst of the activities of an antiquities theft ring preying on ancient Navajo ruins sites in the Four-Corners area of New Mexico, and you have a prescription for the author detailing the joys of photography while having the protagonists, as they fall in love, deal with the inherent dangers of exposing high-value crime perpetrators.
 

Ms. Gotch has a keen eye for detail and shows this story through a flow of snappy dialog. Her character development is good; she is especially adept at portraying Shelby McCoy’s friend Charles Pearson’s downward spiral of flailing good intentions repeatedly thwarted by committing one drunken transgression after another.
 

I used Adobe Acrobat as my electronic reader for this e-book. I found a few edit glitches and a minimal amount of inconsistency in internal monolog presentation, but it was otherwise cleanly edited. For a fun read, try this story some afternoon when you’re lonely and want to spend time with an absorbingly romantic e-book.      
 

© 2005 R. Leland Waldrip