I like ChickLit and I accept its limitations. I enjoyed Bridget Jones Diary. I loved Good in Bed. Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood made me cry. I'm a fan of Sex & the City. I know most ChickLit is derivative, and I expect that. But The Dirty Girls Social Club is *so* derivative that it made my head hurt.

The book follows 6 months in the life of the Dirty Girls Social Club, a group of 5 Latina friends (or is it 6? or maybe only 4? I can't really remember and don't care enough to go look it up) who meet during a freshman journalism course at Boston University. They get together for a mini reunion twice a year, and the book both begins and ends with one of their reunions. The women vary widely in terms of religion, personality and ethnic background. The BIG LESSON readers are supposed to learn is that Latinas are diverse -- their ancestors come from all over the world, and their racial, ethnic and national identities are complex. The reader is bashed over the head with this lesson at least once per chapter.

But the biggest problem with this book is that the characters have no deapth -- they don't feel real. The only thing that gives them an individuality is their problem. Each character has a different issue that they work on through the book: there's the starving artist, the alcoholic, the closeted Lesbian, the domestic violence victim, the one in a loveless marriage and the one that's hunting for a rich husband. All have man problems, and all man problems are neatly solved by the end of the book. Each chapter is devoted to just one character and is written from her point of view. Toward the end, I tended to forget which name was associated with which character -- but I found that I didn't really care since they all sounded the same. The book is a mishmash of all the plots of all the other novels I've read in this genre in the past few years, with a few Spanish words thrown in here and there.

I'm also really bothered by the title. Shouldn't it be The Dirty Girls' Social Club?

This book is definately skipable.