Chick lit Bashing

Avid reader Michele Yacovino has heard it all from so-called chick lit haters and has had enough…

Okay, I don’t know about you guys but who else is sick of all the chick lit bashing? With the way the media talks about chick lit you’d think that chick lit writers were poisoning their readers with love/romance, success and happy endings.

And what wrong with happy endings anyway? We don’t live in a depressing world enough that the books we read have to constantly remind us about how great things are going.

It pisses me off because I don’t see these “reviewers ” (insert sarcasm) are making comments about how unrealistic science-fiction or fantasy is. God forbid they did that – the world might actually end if they did.

People who read these novels read them for a reason. They want an escape. So my question is, why is it okay for science-fiction/fantasy and not okay for chick lit?

I know that quite honestly, chick lit bashing isn’t anything new. For as long as I’ve been reading chick lit (since the summer of 2001), I’ve heard nothing but negativity and snark comments made by people who have never picked up a chick lit book let alone has ever read one.

What gets me is if you’re going to knock something, the smart thing the intelligent thing to do would be to read and research what you are knocking. People who bash chick lit don’t even take the time to actually read it and here’s the thing – you have to actually READ something before you judge it.

Now, I’m not saying that all chick lit is good. Quite frankly there have been quite a few chick lit novels that were some of the worst books I’ve ever read and I took medieval lit in college so trust me, I know what bad is.

But just because I’ve read a few bad books it doesn’t mean I judge the whole genre by those few books I’ve read, because quite frankly that’s unfair and ignorant.

Those of us that read and love the genre know that there are a lot of excellent chick lit writers out there and it’s a shame that just because they want to give their readers a good fun story – one that makes them think and laugh – these writers are taken less seriously and are mocked for what they write.

Even if the chick lit label was changed to something like romantic-comedy, women’s lit or popular fiction, the outcome would still be the same and the haters would still have something to say.

So I bring these questions to you, dear readers. What do you think about people who criticise chick lit? Are they right in their assumptions? What do you think of the chick lit label? Do you find it limiting or degrading in any way?

Michele Yacovino has been an avid reader ever since she first picked up a book. She modestly claims that chick lit changed her life. Michele is currently at work on her first chick lit novel.