cover image Love Songs for Skeptics

Love Songs for Skeptics

Christina Pishiris. Sourcebooks, $16.99 trade paper (416p) ISBN 978-1-7282-1760-4

Journalist Pishiris’s lackluster debut follows a London magazine editor on her quest for love and career fulfillment. Thirty-something Zoë Frixos’s hopes for getting together with her longtime crush, Simon Baxter, who is newly single, are complicated when he starts spending time with his college friend Jessica Honey, who is now a famous singer. Zoë and handsome publicist Nick Jones initially clash when Zoë disparages one of Nick’s clients to him. Then Nick signs as a client Marcie Tyler, a multiplatinum-selling artist said to have influenced David Bowie, and Nick and Zoë work out a quid pro quo: Zoë will convey a message from Marcie to Jessica, with whom Marcie had a falling out, and Nick will arrange for an interview with the famously reclusive Marcie, which Zoë believes will boost sales and save jobs at her ailing music magazine. Zoë realizes that she’s attracted to Nick and frets about him and Simon while uncovering more about the bad blood between Jessica and Marcie, as well as a surprise about Nick. Unfortunately, flimsy characters and ill-advised passages (much ink, for instance, is given to a game of Risk) don’t do this any favors, and Pishiris fails to rework any of the many chick-lit tropes at play. This is an easy one to miss. Agent: Jemima Forrester, David Higham Assoc. (Jan.)