The Northwest girls' guide to chick lit

Call it women's fiction, or call it chick lit — but whatever this popular fiction genre is termed, it's a more complex business here in the Pacific Northwest.

Northwest authors aren't easy to typecast. Take a look at some of the recent offerings in women's fiction, from the laptops of our locals, with each book's rating in chicks:

[Four chicks]

"Magic Hour" by Kristin Hannah (Ballantine Books, 391 pp., $23.95). Child psychiatrist Julia Cates is devastated when one of her patients snaps, engaging in a shooting spree at a church youth group and also catapulting Julia into the national headlines. Damaged by the sensationalistic publicity, the legal proceedings and her own self-doubts — should she have seen this catastrophe coming? — Julia leaves Malibu for Rain Valley, her rustic hometown near the Washington rain forest.

Not long after her arrival, Julia faces a unique new challenge: a feral, undernourished and speechless 6-year-old girl who creeps into town holding a wolf cub. Where did the girl, a true "wild child" like the protagonist of the Truffaut film, come from, and how did she end up in the deep uncharted wilderness of the rain forest?

Julia takes in the little girl, whom she dubs Alice (after the Lewis Carroll book that enthralls her), and tries to determine whether she is teachable, as each helps the other to heal.

Bainbridge Island author Hannah gives us the narrative from both perspectives: the perplexed, nurturing Julia, and the terrified, mute child who knows herself only as Girl.

Subsidiary characters enrich this affecting story, including Julia's long-estranged sister Ellie, and a dashing doctor with a dark past of his own.

[Three and a half chicks]

"Delicious" by Susan Mallery (HQN Books, 377 pp., $6.99). The first of a projected four novels about a Seattle family named Buchanan, "Delicious" has an authentic-sounding restaurant setting and lots of local detail, as well as a bunch of characters that are a little over the top.

The three Buchanan brothers are all amazingly good-looking, volatile and charismatic; their evil and manipulative grandmother is irredeemably ghastly; and everyone's life operates at an overwrought fever pitch.

Yet it's hard not to like this story of a smart-mouthed, gifted chef whose ex-husband (Cal Buchanan) is forced by the near-failure of his family's once-great restaurant — inspired, according to the author's Web site, by the Union Square Grill — to woo her into taking over the kitchen.

The kicker here is that Penny, who has been hearing some pretty loud ticking from her biological clock, is now a few months' pregnant by an anonymous sperm donor, a fact she initially conceals from Cal.

Will the two of them reignite the sparks of their once-hot relationship? Does the bear, um, forage in the woods?

[Three chicks]

"She'll Take It" by Mary Carter (Strapless/Kensington, 295 pp., $12.95). This Seattle writer's debut novel introduces Melanie Zeitgar, a neurotic heroine so self-obsessed and deluded that you'd have trouble liking her if she weren't so hilarious.

An eternally aspiring actress who inhabits a succession of jobs-from-hell as an office temp, Melanie is a walking disaster area who keeps hoping her dance-away boyfriend will call. But when her gift for shoplifting gets her into trouble, she has to decide whether she's brave enough to face the consequences and to deserve that hunky former boss.

[Three and a half chicks]

"Lip Lock" by Susanna Carr (Brava, 292 pp., $14). The nearest of these books to a chick-lit format, this new novel by the Seattle author ("Confessions of a 'Wicked' Woman") is funny and earthy, if predictable. Crushed by debts left by a rotten ex-boyfriend, the deeply unlucky Molly Connors is barely hanging on to her new receptionist job at a security-conscious computer firm run by a brilliant and gorgeous computer tycoon, Kyle Ashton. She's trying to keep up appearances, but Molly can't even afford food and is so hungry, she is reduced to cadging olives in the executive kitchen.

Molly is counting on a promotion and a fatter paycheck, especially when she is evicted from her apartment, but instead she's framed — and subsequently fired — in a corporate-espionage scam after someone plants a crucial blueprint among the papers on her desk.

Jobless, homeless and clueless, Molly creeps off to her boss' seldom-used vacation house on a nearby island. She knows he never goes there, so she should be safe for a few days. If you can't figure out who's on the next ferry, you definitely need a vacation.

Melinda Bargreen is The Seattle Times' classical music critic: mbargreen@seattletimes.com