Must Love Dogs

Following up on themes from her debut novel, Ready to Fall, which looked at the pitfalls of cyberspace romance, Cook here chronicles the perils of various tried and true dating ploys, from personals ads to the use of adorable pooches as date bait. "If I didn't have a job, I might have stayed in bed until I rotted," muses Massachusetts preschool teacher Sarah Hurlihy, almost 41, divorced and dateless for two years. She's out to change all that when she bravely answers a personals ad in a local paper, but instead gets the ultimate nightmarish response her would-be date turns out to be her widower father, something her sprawling Irish Catholic family naturally finds wildly funny. Her oldest sister, Carol, decides the best way for Sarah to move on is to create her own personals ad, and soon Sarah's love life is lively, if not downright rambunctious. "God hates glib," "God hates ugly" and "God hates a smarty-pants" are all standards in the Hurlihy family lexicon, but Cook employs just enough glibness and smarty-pants humor to make this tart slice-of-the-single-life worth reading. As for "ugly," Sarah also learns some serious lessons about what the word really means and it's not a prospective suitor's nose hairs, his bald pate or his beer-belly bulge. Breezy first-person narration makes this a fast-paced, humorous diversion.

Romance