'Alice Aigner is successful, independent and a confirmed serial dater - but at her ten-year school reunion she has a sudden change of heart. Bored rigid by her married, mortgaged and motherly former classmates, Alice decides to prove that a woman can have it all: a man, marriage, career, kids and a mind of her own.
'She sets herself a goal: meet the perfect man and marry him before her thirtieth birthday, just under two years away. Together with her best friends Dannie, Liza and Peta, Alice draws up a ten-point plan. Then, with a little help from her mum, her dad, her brothers, her colleagues and her neighbour across the hall, she sets out to find Mr Right. Unfortunately for Alice, it's not quite as easy as she imagines.
'Who could not fall in love with our Koori heroine as she dates (among others): Renan, whose career goal is to be the world's best moonwalker and male hula dancer; Tufu the commitment-phobic Samoan football player; scary Simon the one-night stand; and Paul - Mr Dreamboat, but perhaps too good to be true. All the while, Alice skilfully avoids dating Cliff, son of her mum's friend, a confirmed bachelor who isn't likely to settle down with a woman anytime soon.' (Publisher's blurb)
' In this essay, I use a close reading of Anita Heiss’s five chick lit novels to argue that racial identity profoundly affects the relationship between the chick lit novel and advice manual genre. In Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit, Caroline Smith contends that the chick lit novel critiques and satirizes regimes of female control through its engagement with the domestic advice manual. This relationship, however, does not always work in the way Smith assumes because the protagonist is not always white: she may be Latina, Chinese, South-East Asian, or, as Anita Heiss shows, Aboriginal Australian: Heiss’s fiction serves as an advice manual, designed to expose readers to the correct norms and behaviors for interacting with Australia’s First Peoples.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.