Milkrun (Red Dress Ink (Numbered Paperback), #23)

by Sarah Mlynowski

[Leah]

A while back I bought myself a few second hand American Chick Lit novels from Amazon because, recently, I’ve been getting more and more into novels by American writers. I knew I wanted to buy one of Sarah Mlynowski’s novels, particularly after I enjoyed her teen effort Gimme A Call. I settled on her debut novel Milkrun, and after Danielle recommended I read it, I picked it up one lazy Sunday. Milkrun is a fairly old Chick Lit novel, a decade old in fact, originally coming out in 2001 but it’s stood the test of time well and it was a nice way to spend my Sunday afternoon.

Milkrun only has 281 pages so it’s a relatively short novel and I managed to finish it in a matter of hours. It’s a fairly predictable novel, one I’ve read a million times before, but I still enjoyed it nonetheless. Jackie has just been dumped by her boyfriend Jeremy because he wanted to see other women whilst he ‘found’ himself in Thailand, so she sets about trying to find a new man, frequenting Boston clubs in her bid to do so helped by her friends Natalie, Sam and Wendy (though Wendy lives in New York so her help is more of the long distance variety). I quite liked how Jackie found herself going out with more and more losers, as she tried to find the right man for her. There were a lot of laugh-out-loud moments and I enjoyed getting into Jackie’s hectic search!

The cast of characters are very interesting. Jackie’s a fab heroine, very much in the mould of Becky Bloomwood and I loved her. Her fascination with Jeremy at the beginning was a bit much but I loved that she decided to represent him using a symbol, it made me laugh out loud. As for Jackie’s friends, I wasn’t entirely taken with rich-girl Natalie, but I absolutely loved Sam and Wendy. Sam is uber-clean and a huge neat freak so she and Jackie, as they’re room-mates, rub each other up the wrong way at the beginning but they begin to bond soon enough and Sam was far more interesting then I gave her credit for. We only really see Wendy from a long-distance perspective but she was as good a best friend as you’d expect.

The book’s told from Jackie’s perspective, meaning lots of talking to herself and thoughts out loud, and I liked that. It made it easy for me to understand Jackie. I finished the novel fairly quickly, but like I said, it was a bit predictable. The whole Jeremy thing irritated me, particularly when he inevitably returned, but bar that the book was enjoyable enough. I’ll definitely be picking up Sarah’s other Chick Lit novels, they seem very promising and Milkrun is definitely a book to read when you’re wanting something fairly lightweight and easy to get into. It was exactly what I was looking for, and it’s definitely a book that’s aged fairly well.