Calendar Girl
Naomi Neale
Dorchester Making It, Jan 2005, $12.95
ISBN: 0843954701

In New York City, Nan Cloutier believes she is the ideal calendar girl pin-up not because she is Playboy perfect, but because she obtains holiday jobs. Her current temporary work is posing as Cindy-Lou Who at the Merrier-Iverson Department Store Christmas interactive display. When she lies about being proficient in French to avoid window duty, Nan meets store owner Mr. Iverson, but her actions leads to the gentle elderly man breaking his leg.

Her former employer offers her a job to baby-sit his grandson Colm. Needing the money with Christmas over, she accepts. When she meets Colm, he is her age and believes she is a hooker. Mr. Iverson explains he was matchmaking because he believes these two delightful youngsters are good for one another. Colm courts Nan, but her personal life is overfilled as she feels she must save her former college boyfriend and fellow member of the Elizabethan Failures Society from an English invader. Still Colm keeps the pressure on and they fall in love even as their respective families try making them over rather than letting them make it.

This is an amusing, Manhattan, chick lit romance starring a delightful lead female protagonist and a fabulous secondary cast. The storyline never takes itself seriously as Nan and cohorts struggles with life, but refuse to believe they are failures. Colm provides a wonderful newcomer into her circle though she wonders if he is a deadly virus or her forever soulmate. Chick lit and contemporary romance readers will laugh with Naomi Neale's naughty and nice tale of a Who who finds love.

Harriet Klausner