Comparing chick lit to therapy: welcome Isabelle Andover to the Celebration of Chick Lit Tour!  

When I sat down to write this blog post about why I love and write chick lit, it was just after the Paris terror attacks. For two days, I had read nothing but the news. It was the middle of NaNoWriMo, but I suddenly found that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, write any more words. It could so easily have been me, or one of my friends, so why wasn’t I hammering out 3,000 words a day, driven by the sheer joy of simply being alive?

I struggled to put my finger on what I was feeling until an author friend of mine from New Zealand summed it up perfectly: ‘you’ll be feeling very weird about everything at the moment’, she emailed. And she was right. I was.

“I need to borrow one of your Chick Lit books,” a fellow expat in Paris said to me. “I feel like everyone knows someone caught up in what happened and I need to escape.”

And this is why I love Chick Lit—because it’s the best therapy. It’s light, funny, and relatable, and getting lost in a good book turned out to be exactly what we needed. Perhaps most importantly, unlike in real life, a happy-ever -after in Chick Lit is (almost always) guaranteed.

The best books are when it’s fiction but it doesn’t feel like it, when the dialogue could be a conversation you’d have with your friends, and when it’s 2am and you have to be up in four hours, but you can’t stop yourself from reading just one more page. For me, Chick Lit delivers on every count. It does so much more than merely entertain: it reassures, inspires and gives hope. And we all, at sometimes more than others, need hope.

Meredith: This cover is such fun!!

Cocktails at Le Carmen

When job cuts at Chloe Saddler’s London communications firm result in an unexpected transfer to Paris, she finds herself leaving behind her friends, family, and boyfriend Scott to start a new life in the City of Light. Getting to grips with La Vie Parisienne and keeping a long-distance relationship afloat is not made any easier by the culture shock. Committing the odd French faux pas and inadvertently indulging in a few too many flirtations with her very sexy (and very taken) boss, Jean-Luc, is just the start of it. Factor in her bridezilla of a sister’s wedding (the hottest event of the year in the Saddler family’s social calendar), an unexpected session of hot, naked yoga, a slightly psychotic stalker, and one incredible kiss at an infamous Montmartre nightspot, and Chloe can say au revoir to her old, safe London life and bonjour to the romance, splendour, and glamour of Paris.

A delightful debut that harks back to the early days of Chick Lit when heroines were flawed, funny, and forever battling for love and happiness. With quirky characters and classic comedic charm, Cocktails at Le Carmen is pure fun from page one.

Available at:

Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and Kobo

Isabelle Andover

Originally from England, Isabelle Andover moved to France after graduating from Durham University with a degree in Modern Languages. She lives in Paris with her tabby cat Oscar, who occasionally blogs about apartment-style living in the City of Light, and who also inspired a prize-winning short story when he was a kitten.

Following several years as a media analyst, Isabelle now works at a Paris-based media company specialized in the international beauty market. In addition to fully embracing the culture of her adopted country by way of consuming plenty of French wine and cheese, Isabelle can also be found indulging in the typically British pursuits of shopping at Marks and Spencer on the Champs Elysées and drinking copious cups of Earl Grey. You can learn more about Isabelle by visiting her website.

Novelista Girl – January 6, 2016

Readers first met sassy Kimberly Long in Blogger Girl, and now the feisty New Yorker is back in a sequel packed with quick wit, friendship, heartache, and, of course, romance.

Kim runs the most popular chick lit book blog on the web, loves playing house with her sexy lawyer boyfriend, Nicholas, and is finally pursuing her lifelong dream to become a published author. At first glance, her life is five-pink-champagne-flutes worthy. 

But is there more to the story than meets the eye?

 After hearing the phrase “chick lit is dead” more times than she’s read Bridget Jones’s Diary, Kim is driven to desperate measures, seeking advice from up-and-coming chick lit author, Hannah Marshak, her high school nemesis and resident “mean girl.” As if Kim doesn’t have enough on her plate balancing her secretarial duties with her blog Pastel Is the New Black, shrugging off the growing pile of agent rejections, and keeping her best friend from turning green over Kim’s budding friendship with Hannah, Nicholas is so blinded by his career ambitions, he doesn’t see that their home sweet home could use more than a dash of sugar. 

This is the year when all of Kim’s dreams—professional and romantic—are supposed to come true, but will the story have a happily ever after, or will Kim end up unpublished and all alone?

This novel can be read as a sequel or as a standalone and is best accompanied by a cocktail, preferably a pink one.