In fifth grade, my mom gave me five dollars to spend at our school fair, and I made a beeline for the gymnastics room, where all of the mats had been removed and replaced with tables upon tables of books. At the time, I was enamored with the “hot pink and white” color scheme, as any who had the pleasure of viewing my BuddyProfile.com account knew quite well, so it was only natural that the first book to catch my eye sported a bright white cover with a hot pink shopping tag and playful font. I was beholden to the zeitgeist as an eleven-year-old, which meant that I was physically incapable of resisting fonts that looked like they were written in marker by a child. This book had it all. And thus, the day of the school fair marked a seminal moment in my life: my introduction to the queen of what we once called “chick lit,” and we now (according to a podcast I listened to eight hours ago) call “commercial women’s fiction” (CWF): Sophie Kinsella.

            I have loved reading for as long as I can remember—you don’t really have a choice when you grow up hating organized sports and being less than marginally talented at art, let’s be honest. Confessions of a Shopaholic was the first real CWF title I ever read, followed closed by another perennial favorite, which I am fully planning on rereading and reviewing, Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging (the book that informed my sense of humor, for better or for worse). I am not being hyperbolic when I say that these books taught me more about life than anything else. The characters became my friends; their problems were problems I understood I might someday encounter, and experiencing them before I did meant that I would not be alone once I did. A hundred conversations about accounting or stocks with my Dad couldn’t have held a candle to me watching Becky Bloomwood try to figure out how to pay down her debt (granted, her methods are not ones that any financial expert would EVER recommend, but still, I learned what debt was). My mom could have sat me down for “the talk,” but wasn’t it more fun to learn about it via Georgia Nicholson’s protagonist and her obsession with “sex god” Robbie? No offense to my parents, but it did make things easier on all of us.

            A notable feature of all of my favorite YA/CWF is that it is English. I absolutely fell prey to the popular series on our side of the pond, but they were a bit more sinister; more focused on further glamorizing the stereotype omnipresent in so much of the American cultural canon: the mean girl. Gossip Girl and The Clique were in their heyday, and while I loved them, I didn’t derive the same innocent enjoyment from them in the way I did my British books.

            At this point, I’ve read all the Sophie Kinsella and Georgia Nicholson there is to read, and, for a long time, I’ve been searching for some CWF that produces the same feelings of warmth within me that their books have. For those seeking a similar sensation, I’m happy to present two CWFs that have made their way onto my favorites shelf. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.

 Expectation, Anna Hope

Expectation came out in the US in April 2020, and I’m shocked it didn’t generate more buzz. It’s somewhere between The Most Fun We Ever Had and Girl, Woman, Other in terms of its “seriousness.” Expectation tracks three best friends from their time as fresh-out-of-college roommates in London through to their mid-thirties. Each character represents an archetype: there’s Hannah, the frigid career woman experiencing failure for the first time as her fertility struggles begin to erode her marriage; Lissa, the beautiful, bohemian daughter of an equally bohemian and emotionally unavailable single mother, struggling to make it as a stage actress and uninterested in committing to a relationship that isn’t toxic; and Cate, dealing with the realities of a surprise baby and impulsive marriage to her first male partner in years after being heartbroken by a woman she can’t stop thinking about.

            Chapters rotate perspective from character to character, but each section starts with the same line: “It is Saturday, which is market day. It is late spring, or early summer. It is mid-May, and the dogwood roses are in bloom…,” an eerie literary device employed effectively to mark the rapid passage of time. Though a lot of what happens in the book is on the darker side, any female who’s ever had a friend (hopefully all of you!) will recognize not only parts of herself, but also of her friends and friendships, in one or all of the characters. Added bonus: Anna Hope writes beautifully about food, specifically in the scenes with Lissa and her mother, which I still think about to this day.

Ghosts, Dolly Alderton

            Dolly Alderton. Where to even begin? Co-host of the glorious, now-defunct podcast The High Low, once my weekly respite for incredible book recommendations and incisive takes on current events (until the last six months, when the “current events” aspect devolved into them talking about dogs with green fur—I still miss it, but let’s call a spade a spade), Dolly has been an inspiration to me since I discovered her in 2018. A few months after starting the podcast, I devoured her first book, Everything I Know About Love, a memoir in the style of Nora Ephron that explores romance, heartbreak, and friendship, interspersed with laugh-out-loud anecdotes and mouthwatering recipes. When she announced last summer that she’d be publishing a fiction book about millennial singledom and dating in London, my heart swelled with hope that our next Kinsella had arrived. And when the book was generously lent to me by my roommate (even after I had lent her copy of Everything I Know About Love to…hmm, everyone I know, and absolutely trashed it) in October 2020, I read it cover-to-cover in two sittings.

            Ghosts follows Nina, wading into the world of app dating, who meets and falls in love with a mystery man called Max. The book charts their whirlwind romance alongside her relationship with her parents and her parent’s relationship to each other, as her father starts to exhibit signs of dementia with increasing intensity. Those parts, while frustrating (the way she behaves around Max) and devastating (the scenes featuring her father), are not the hallmark of the book. As was the case with Everything I Know About Love, which (spoiler alert) is actually a beautiful love letter to female friendships, Dolly is at her best when she’s writing friends. The scenes between Nina and her “fellow single friend” Lola, where they chug wine, gossip, and commiserate for hours were a joy to read—let’s call it the Kinsella effect.