20 Times a Lady: A Novel
Bosnak, the woman behind the popular "Save Karyn" Web site (she also penned a book by the same title), makes her fiction debut with the tepid tale of Delilah Darling, a woman on the cusp of 30 who loses her job and sleeps with her heinous former boss in an entanglement that's the 20th notch on her headboard. It's a painful realization, as she'd just read in theNew York Post, that the average person has 10.5 partners in their lifetime. Fearing she has more than reached her quota, Delilah takes off on a cross-country trip, determined to find "the one" among the 20 of her former lovers. But she soon discovers that the men of her romantic past"an inmate, a rehab patient, a dog-obsessed Amway salesman and a Muppeteer among them"aren't exactly life-partner material. Clever chapter breaks that feature maps and voice-mail transcripts are fun additions, but the story"hobbled by limp humor, razor-thin characters and phoned-in prose"takes too long to find its inevitably happy ending.(July)Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.