Jody Gehrman Tart

Tart

Jody Gehrman

Red Dress, Jul 2005, $12.95, 320 pp.

ISBN: 0373895267

In Austin, Texas, Claudia Brown enjoys a casual relationship with her boyfriend Jonathan, but is not ready for anything permanent. She decides to discard domestic tranquility especially since Jonathan has already found a younger female and she then returns to amazon tart status. She steals Jonathan's SUV and drives west only to have his bus ignite on fire; an oil change would have helped before the engine went up in flames, but it is too late now. Biker Clay Parker takes Claudia and her cat Medea to Santa Cruz where she will teach theatre at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Claudia and Clay hit it off until she learns he is married to a department peer and to make matters worse, his mother heads the department. Her class thinks she is a fake as her acting technique seems way out and some say so. However, her biggest issue is that she is falling in love with Clay and he seems so in love with Selena.

TART is an engaging west coast chick lit tale starring a nice woman determined to return to her "roots" although Claudia cannot fully hide the real woman. Sub-genre readers will enjoy Claudia's up and down (figuratively but somewhat literally) relationship with "bad" boy biker Clay, who is a kind caring person. Fans will agree with his assessment that communication between them such as her asking him about his feelings would have solved many of their problems, but the fun is that she did not so the audience obtains an interesting dysfunctional relationship drama.

Harriet Klausner