Cracks in My Foundation: Bags, Trips, Make-Up Tips, Charity, Glory, and the Darker Side of the Story; Essays and Stories

Bestseller Keyes does what she does best in this collection of stories and essays: wax comic about shoes, hairdressers, makeup, travel, family and romance in prose as light and sweet as a sugar-dusted angel food cake. Her essay ""They Say You Always Remember Your First Time..."" offers a glimpse of Keyes's love affair with makeup, and while it reads like an enthusiastic letter to the product pages of Vogue, it's also sprinkled with endearing bouts of self-deprecation (""If face creams were husbands, then I am Elizabeth Taylor""). While most of the short stories stick solidly on the side of fun, Keyes makes a few attempts to tackle more serious topics, from divorce in the odd ""A Woman's Right to Shoes,"" to domestic abuse in the far graver ""Under."" While the book feels even less substantial than the average chick lit confection, Keyes's winning voice and her focus on the basic business of life and how to live it happily should appeal to female readers caught between Sex in the City and The Golden Girls.