20 Times a Lady

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 the New 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)