Check Me Out

It’s difficult to say who would enjoy this contemporary romance, since the thin, white 20-somethings at its heart are depicted as shallow and self-absorbed, and everyone who’s fatter, browner, or older is made the target of the heroine’s casual cruelty and obliviousness. Greta is an assistant in the quaint Victorian library of Franklin, Ohio. She’s perkily unkind to everyone, including her “best friend,” Will, who is “huge in the way that nobody really wants to be.” Her narrative is Cyrano de Bergerac from the woman’s perspective, told entirely without irony. Will claims to love Greta, but promotes her to his gorgeous cousin Mac because she has “the package” of brains and beauty that Mac wants; Greta reads the cheesy pick-up lines printed on Mac’s T-shirts as love letters aimed uniquely at her; and Mac has no apparent reason other than narcissism to engage in this nonsense. As these three use one another romantically, Greta nominates herself to singlehandedly save the library from the stinginess of the city’s voters, assuming she can take time away from griping about her obsessively matchmaking mother, the longtime senior librarians, the wheelchair users who dare to want an accessible library, and Indian food. She dismisses the humanity of everyone around her—and she’s rewarded abundantly for it. The reader, however, is not. (Feb.)