Like all good chick-lit heroines, Minerva Gallant is brimming with pluck and drive. She’s successful and well liked at her job as a television producer. She’s the gal who’s confident enough to cut her friends’ names from two syllables to one. (Lucy is “Luce,” Barry is “Bar,” Trudy becomes “Trudes.”) She has recreational sex with good-looking guys and she volunteers at a shelter for homeless men, where she banters easily with the clientele and knows many of them by name.
    But halfway through her 40th year, Minnie’s world starts to falter. When the new project she’s working on for Myriad Television goes “tits up,” she’s forced into hiatus, and Minnie lands in the tiny fishing village of Tuck Harbour, PEI.
    Louisa McCormack’s second novel (after 2006’s Six Weeks to Toxic) is a fast-paced, accessible book, and McCormack, a former Montrealer who now makes her home in Charlottetown, employs colourful language and detail with authority and to good effect, particularly when depicting PEI’s many splendours. But on occasion her words miss the mark, and the reader is forced to read, frown, reread, shrug, and simply carry on. Case in point, here’s Minnie swimming at the beach on her uncle’s property: “I went down butt first, hard on the hair but good for the skin: impromptu antibiotics.”
    Dire environmental messages are not frequently communicated via chick lit, but here the disastrous implications of commercial fishing are compellingly set against the importance the fisheries hold in the lives of so many Islanders. The reader learns more about the issue through Minnie’s relationship with Joe McTeal, a hunky Tuck Harbour fisherman and bachelor – a fling that is not entirely convincing, except for the refreshingly frank sex scenes.
    In the end, Minnie’s love affair with Joe and with the Island itself is not for the long haul. But don’t weep for Minnie, for she returns to Toronto with an idea that will educate the world on the plight of the oceans and re-establish her as a producer of note. Ah, if only life were like that.