Chick Lit has a reputation for being a genre about women desperate to bag a man. Women, who in their singleminded focus on lurve, are flaking out on the rest of their responsibilities. I think this is a bit of an unfair stereotype, but for someone who thinks that, reading Getting Personal would, unfortunately only reinforce this view.

Martin, Ruby, and Louisa are all single Londoners looking for the right lid for their respective pots. They have all been unlucky in their prior romantic endeavors. One night at the pub, after one of Ruby’s relationships with not-quite-divorced men goes belly up, Louise proposes an experiment. They should try to pick for each other. After all they are friends, they know each other at least as well as they know themselves and they could perhaps be a bit more objective about picking a Mr. or Ms. Right. To do this, they will place personal ads and wade through the responses. Then they will all meet at one restaurant for a three-way blind date. Hey, it can’t hurt, right? True love could be right around the corner.

Getting Personal is written in the rather impersonal omniscient point of view and somehow, despite inviting the reader to be privy to the very private humiliations of Lou, Martin, and especially Ruby, Manby never quite succeeds in making these three seem fully human in a detailed, vulnerable way. Ruby’s character is the closest to three-dimensional, perhaps because her embarrassing experiences are so many and varied. She is truly blind when it comes to men and love and has no discernable sense of self-preservation. It was hard not to wince whenever she went out on a date. Martin also made some bad choices, but most of them didn’t backfire on him as badly as they did on Ruby. Manby seems to reinforce the stereotype here that a woman who will sleep with someone on a first date is emotionally needy and uncontrolled while a man who does the same thing is just passing the time.

Louisa is a smarter character, but she still finds herself in the kind of stifling one-way relationship that is painful to read about. Manby neglects to explore her character fully because in doing so she would have to reveal one of the book’s biggest surprises. Unfortunately, the reader doesn’t get to know Louisa at all well, and when the surprise comes, it seemingly comes from left field.

Martin and Ruby have a history, and it’s clear that Martin has feelings for Ruby. He names the hero and heroine of his first novel-in-progress Mark and Ruthie. But neither of them seems particularly tender with each other – at least not until very late in the story, and even then it’s one-sided. Ruby, in fact, is utterly callous to Martin, and considering her utterly pathetic neon-sign lack of self-respect or dignity, it’s hard to know what about her calls to him.

Getting Personal isn’t a total loss. It’s capably written and, at times, very funny. The first blind date scene had me laughing out loud. And, of course, misadventures in love are something most of us can relate to in one way or another. There’s also a subplot about Ruby searching for her birthmother that I personally found interesting. But add some deus ex machina plotting to the above problems and you get an uneven reading experience at best. If you want to read a better book with a funny, sometime flaky heroine, a pining hero, and unresolved childhood issues, I’d pick up a copy of Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married by Marian Keyes instead.