Oh, no, I thought, not anoth­er Brid­get Jones knock­off. Sex and the City is over. I just can’t face anoth­er dat­ing mis­ad­ven­ture where the frog turns into a prince on the penul­ti­mate page and anoth­er hap­py cou­ple hops off into the gold­en sun­set. Been there, done that and any­way, a frog is more inter­est­ing than a prince. 

And yet…here’s one with a slight­ly dif­fer­ent twist. The struc­ture works, with the author tak­ing us around the cal­en­dar, hol­i­day by hol­i­day, Jew­ish and sec­u­lar, the plucky, not-too-cheer­ful­ly opti­mistic hero­ine mud­dling through as years turn into decades, hop­ing to con­nect, watch­ing friends cou­ple off, dream­ing dreams that may nev­er come true. We do mark our lives one hol­i­day at a time, suc­cess­es and fail­ures inter­twin­ing with hol­i­day hopes. The tech­nique gives the sto­ry a real­is­tic touch, poignant and bittersweet. 

The parade of men march­ing through these pages, though per­haps a bit too long, is diverse enough to be inter­est­ing. Even the most pathet­ic losers have a cer­tain charm. Maybe this one isn’t the one; maybe the next one isn’t the one; maybe the one after that isn’t the one; but maybe one of them will be. Who knows? Anoth­er hol­i­day approach­es with the turn of a cal­en­dar page. 

Kar­rie, our hope­ful pro­tag­o­nist, is an actress, a New York­er, a Jew. Her numer­ous dat­ing deba­cles are fil­tered though these sen­si­bil­i­ties with authen­tic fla­vor. Kar­rie reminds me of some­one I met some­where. Or everywhere. 

The redeem­ing fea­ture of this book, what makes it work when all is said and done, is that no prince appears to res­cue our damsel in dis­tress. The damsel finds she can res­cue her­self just fine, thank you. She learns to accept and val­ue her­self, appre­ci­at­ing her own strengths and accom­plish­ments. Maybe the right man will appear some day. Maybe some day will turn into nev­er. It mat­ters, but oth­er things mat­ter more. Princess Charm­ing doesn’t need a prince to make life worthwhile. 

This is a light read with enough extra res­o­nance to make it stand out from the crowd.