The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing Book

It is a shame that Bank's prose is categorized as chick lit, because there is real weight and substance in her writing style. Perhaps she gets lumped into that fluffy genre because of her age and her contemporaries are cranking out pop fiction instead of literary fiction.

Her characters proceed with humor, but it is not cheeky or plucky. If her characters were brought to life on tv, it would be a drama, not a comedy.

Like my favorite short story collection of all time, The Nick Adams Stories, the protagonist, Jane Rosenal observes the world as a teenager through her early adulthood.

"I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous . . . I saw myself the way I'd seen the cleaning woman in the building across the street. I was just one person in one window. Nobody was watching, except me."

The angst is palpable and more palatable than Holden Caulfield which makes it easy to come back to read again and again lost after resolving my own teen angst. She wrote a follow up and I hope she keeps writing more.