What a Girl Wants is the latest addition to an army of Chick Lit novels that in recent years have forged a unique place for themselves in the female fiction market, addressing problems to do with career, relationships and life from a female perspective. Maverick’s debut novel fits the mold and hits a cross somewhere between Bridget Jones’s Diary – via scattered heroine Hayley Jane Smith – and Sex and the City, as Hayley Jane relies on ritual Sunday morning brunches with her three closest female friends to solve her life’s most pressing problems.

It’s a summer of record temperatures in San Francisco and poor Hayley Jane realizes that the stench in her cramped office at a New Technology start-up (where she works creating content for their magazine) is not so much the miasma of bodies quartered too closely, but rather the recently deceased Fred Leary, the colleague who occupied the next cubicle. Luckily, investigating officer Lt. Grant Hutchinson is on hand to mop up her hysterical tears, resulting in an embarrassingly intimate clinch that explicitly demonstrates their chemistry.

In true Chick Lit style, our intrepid heroine is soon off to her troop of twenty-something friends for support and advice, convinced that this inexplicable episode is the start of some sort of personal crisis. Audra is a high-powered executive at a venture capitalist firm in Silicon Valley who appears to have the perfect life, Suz is a well-endowed model (currently the “Johnny Beer” girl) with commitment issues, and Diane is an eternal student who avoids real life by immersing herself in a constant round of cramming for endless diplomas. Together, the girls bump heads to try to help their friend, although Diane decides to use Hayley’s recently quite interesting love life for her upcoming thesis on human sexuality, while Audra and Suz are mostly trying to best each other as to who can give the most successful advice.

Shortly after her return to work, she puts the advice of friend Audra to the test, confronting her boss about a promised raise that never materialized. However, she isn’t expecting it when as soon as her boss puts her face to a name, Hayley is kicked out on her ear (her copy is too “snarky,” she is told) and the neurotic Audra breaks out in hives at the thought of her advice failing to hit the mark. At their next Sunday morning gathering, the girls implement the next stage of their plan of action to get Hayley out of her rut of indecision, mostly involving her career and her love-life.

A visit to Audra’s miracle-man therapist, a bar-crawl session with the busty model Suz where she attempts to build her confidence by dressing in a skimpy outfit, and a new job (where they love how snarky she is) that is suspiciously similar to her old job are their prescription. But as we witness Hayley try to make sense of her life, her stumbling moments of self-discovery seem to take place almost despite her friends’ well-intentioned but interfering ways.

When Hayley encounters the delectable Grant Hutchinson at the funeral of Fred Leary she, in quintessential Chick Lit style, not only creates an embarrassing scene, she also later over-analyzes every last detail of the encounter with her friends. It seems that reading things into innocent situations and making the wrong move based on shaky conclusions are a stock-in-trade device of this kind of novel, and Maverick doesn’t deviate from this. A subsequent date with Grant is dissected as well, and the two truly begin an earthy, physical relationship.

One reason the Chick Lit genre has flourished is that the heroine can be relied upon to be imperfect, and therefore relatable. Hayley is no exception. The observations the author makes on life for the twenty-something generation working in the New Economy are spot on and satirized very intelligently (e.g., when Hayley is asked to build her own desk at her new job as both a team-building and money-saving exercise). Many of the twenty-somethings who read this may have lived through the New Technology slump and will recognize similarities to their own experience. And as for the dissection of dates and men, well, we’ve all done that too, haven’t we? The humor may not be laugh-out-loud funnly, but it keeps the book light-hearted and enjoyable, and resulted in many original and creative scenes.

Grant Hutchinson, while we don’t really see much of him, is an adorable hero, a man refreshingly unafraid of his attraction to Hayley. Their chemistry is convincingly described and the author makes you sympathize with Hayley’s endlessly wondering if they are meant to be rather than her coming across as desperate and pathetic. Also, she doesn’t fall into the trap of unrealistically presenting Grant as “the one,” allowing the relationship to grow at a natural and reasonable pace.

As for what works less well, well, the principal characters are exaggerated to the point of them being almost caricaturish – it’s hard to imagine a world populated by neurotic control freaks like Audra. The problem with the standard Chick Lit devices is that although they may inject humor, they also devalue the otherwise serious parts of the novel where the heroine gets a clue. And, despite the witty observations that were a high point for me, there were vast tracts of dialogue-less prose designed to transmit Hayley’s innermost thoughts that did not appeal. The chipper, superficial tone of the prose, clearly meant to make extraordinary events such as sudden death objects of comic/urbane humor, didn’t really work for me. The juxtaposition, for example, of Haley stumbling across a dead guy and then indulging in a make-out session with a total stranger was jarring. Nevertheless, niggles aside, What a Girl Wants is a lighthearted feel-good celebration of female friendship that takes a humorous look at a group of twenty-somethings trying to find their feet in the grown up world. It earns a qualified recommendation.