B
lock (None of Your Business
) adds a nearing-40 protagonist to the chick lit formula in her third novel, and the result is an entertaining winner. Diane Kurasik, a basically happy 39-year-old New Yorker interested in more than just men and shopping, runs a successful repertory theater, the Bedford Street Cinema, and has a fabulous rent-controlled apartment in the Village. But she's single, her job is losing its charm, and she's evicted from her apartment. Diane spends exhausting days searching the city for a new home, living out of suitcases in friends' guest rooms and squalid sublets while overseeing a long-awaited theater renovation. A welcome distraction arrives when she meets Vladimir Hurtado Padrón, a sexy Cuban architect. At first she hopes he might signal the end to an interminable series of boring blind dates, but he turns out to be a handful, not to mention married with a 17-year-old son he hasn't seen in 10 years. New Yorkers will cringe at the painfully accurate apartment-hunting scenes, and the novel is peppered with film trivia and instances in which life (usually Diane's) imitates art. Film buffs and readers bored with fluffy love stories will welcome the novel's sly substance. (July)
