cover image Bikini Season

Bikini Season

Sheila Roberts. St. Martin's Griffin, $13.95 (273pp) ISBN 978-0-312-37080-0

It's January, and four Seattle-area women turn their cooking club into a diet program with the goal of fitting into bikinis by summer. Predictably, each has a problem: party planner Erin can't fit into her wedding dress and, besides, she's marrying the wrong man, a fact that's obvious to everyone but her. A doctor has ordered Kizzy, owner of a home shop (and, at 55, the oldest of the group), to lose weight for health reasons, while chubby homemaker Angela resents her husband's sexy assistant, and attorney Megan's lifelong weight issues are undermining her self-confidence. Although Roberts (On Strike for Christmas) stages some amusing scenes as the friends fall into dieting traps and support one another, Angela's jumping to conclusions and Erin's cluelessness about her own feelings drag down the proceedings. Of the four women, only Megan seems to spring from a palpable internal reality as she faces her insecurities and takes charge of her career.