Valerie Frankel, The Girlfriend Curse

Valerie Frankel, The Girlfriend Curse - Peg Silver is tired of finding men, getting them interested in marriage, and having them wed someone else as her last boyfriend Paul Tester, her seventh failure in less than a decade, just did. She concludes that she needs a full-body, lifestyle makeover, starting with a change of scenery as she is sick of someone else gaining the fruits of her labors. Peg decides it is time to leave the asphalt jungle of New York where she has resided for her entire thirty-two years of living and rusticate elsewhere, just not the burbs because that would be too much of a fall.

During the grueling seven hour train trek to White River Junction, Vermont, Peg receives an accidental poke in the eye when she tried to be Good Samaritan and then meets womanizing Ray Quick who climbed on board in Hartford. She decides to delay her search for an organic male to join him at the Inward Bound retreat In Manshire, Vermont, where he is going to attend a seminar on curing neurotic dating patterns. At the retreat, Peg finds herself still attracted to Ray, but also pulled towards the facilitator Linus Bester.

THE GIRLFRIEND CURSE is a strong chick lit tale that focuses deeply on relationships, mostly through Peg's troubles, paraphrasing her thoughts that she can make men come, but not stay. The deep cast turns the tale into a powerful and insightful look at why relationships work or fail. Peg is gold as the center of the novel while her two male competitors bring out the best and worst in her. Relationship drama readers will receive immense pleasure from this perceptive, contemporary fiction novel.

Avon, Mar 2005, $12.95, 292 pp.

ISBN: 0060725540

Harriet Klausner