Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close

Girls in White Dresses

I guess some would call this chick lit, but I hesitate because when men write good books, they don't call them "guy lit."  Actually I was thinking of putting a category on this blog called "Guy Books," but that's another story.  Here, we have a group of girlfriends who are like a cloud; constantly changing and floating around.  Sometimes peripheral characters have little vignettes, but somebody from the core group is always there.  These characters are so fleshed out that they seem alive.  This writing is so detailed without being tedious, that your synapses are gathering information in almost the same way you do in a live conversation with someone.  I just read The Family Fang on Kindle (despite all the publisher hype, that was ten bucks wasted), and the Fang family are like paper dolls compared with the characters in this book, and the writing was childish.  I'll state here that I listened to the AUDIO version of Girls in White Dresses.  It was so well read with little accents, nuances and inflections, that despite the wealth of female characters, it was not confusing.  Lauren was one of my favorite characters, and toward the middle and end of the book, I was laughing out loud.  If you can remember what it was like to be a young, single woman living in a city with your girlfriends, you will adore this book.  And I'd recommend it to anyone who just wouldn't mind stepping into that world for a bit, in the same way we do when we read books set in other countries.   Through the relationships (and lack thereof) and many hangovers, they stay friends, but this book is not sticky sweet.  I don't know if the humor will transcend reading the written form, but I hope so.  This is on free library download through Overdrive, so you can slap it on your MP3.  This is not the vapid chick lit that kills so many trees, but something elevated above that.  No crazy plot, no cute gimmicks, no big catastrophes, just realistic writing.  I'll be looking for any future novels by Jennifer Close.