I just finished a good book that is available later this year. Ten Thousand Light Years from Okay by Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katman was a winner for me.

I was hoping that the intriguing premise would yield something of substance, but this is chick lit at best (of which I am not a fan). Our protagonist believes that she has the power to write things into existence because her book (in which the husband dies) caused her own husband's accidental death ("Obviously, I hadn't killed him, but what if my words somehow had?"). I'm all for suspending disbelief as a reader, but given that this is not magical realism, our protagonist just reads as delusional and silly.

Unfortunately I had to abandon the book pretty early on as there were just too many infuriatingly dumb aspects, including an absolutely ridiculous exchange that would never happen in a professional organization - Thea gets told off at work (and has to issue an apology) because she used a semicolon in a newsletter about flowers ("This newsletter isn't an SAT reading comp passage or a literary work. Normal people, the audience for this newsletters, see a semicolon and they freak out. They wonder what it means. And when they don't know, because, I mean, really, who knows the proper use of a semicolon, they feel inferior and insecure. This alienates them from the brand, and then they don't buy flowers."

The level of mindlessness required on the part of the reader in order to make this book palatable is really quite insulting.