Everyone Else's Girl
Megan Crane
Warner, Oct 2005, $12.95
ISBN: 0446694339

Several years ago, twenty-eight year old Meredith McKay fled the Hoboken area to escape her pain in the butt family, and feels good about her life, as she likes her job and her boyfriend. When her brother Christian calls demanding she come home to help care for their father while he heals from a broken leg he received in a car accident, she wants to say no, as their dad has three adult children with two living nearby. However, being the responsible one, she arranges time off from work to come home so that her mother can continue her tour of Europe without knowing of her spouse's accident.

Girl code insures that Meredith behaves when she sees her former best friend from high school Jeannie, though she would prefer to slap her once pal, but she is Christian's fianc e. She keeps her sister Hope and Christian from killing one another while tending to her father's needs. Meredith cannot wait to get out of Dodge, until she meets sexy Scott Sheridan, whom she and her crowd tormented in high school as befitting nerd status. They share torrid relations, which she finds divine, and he finds as retribution for what Meredith and her merrymakers did to him a decade ago.

This chick lit contemporary romance is refreshed by Meredith's reassessment of her seemingly dysfunctional family, as she draws different conclusions the second time around, by living with them as she grows from scorn to understanding. The cast is solid as her siblings, her future sister-in-law, her lover, and her dad turn Meredith's cushy world upside down. Meredith's maturation is handled with humor and pathos so that the sub-genre fans receive a wonderful tale.

Harriet Klausner