It seems Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw’s not the only one typing away her modern malaise. In Deanna Kent-McDonald’s first novel, West Wind, North Chatter, the entire town of Grand Prairie, Alberta, is busy at their keyboards composing meditations on life and love. At the centre of this flurry of word-processing is an Internet café called Bean There and its troubled thirtysomething owner, Emily Reeves. Though Emily moves to the rigging community for a teaching job, when she suffers a miscarriage and subsequent divorce, she decides to take refuge in a new shop and its customers.

At first Emily is unsure whether her hip coffeehouse will attract the locals. But soon a cluster of stock characters – the oh-so-put-together businesswoman, the sensitive Generation Y barista, and the crusty loner who takes his coffee black – are coming round for small talk and their turn online. However, these clients share little with Emily or each other. Only in their private e-mails do they disclose affairs, family illnesses, and the disappointments of the daily grind. Despite being from a close-knit hamlet, the residents here are isolated and disengaged. Are their wired ways to blame or are they their only source of relief?

These are somewhat tired questions. And the characters’ banal (if realistic) e-mails can get wearing. So is the “sex in a small town” twist on the chick-lit genre. West Wind, North Chatter has only one one-night stand. A great girl-read should be as delicious and light as a non-fat mochaccino. This is more herbal tea.

Kent-McDonald’s observations of the strains of the computer cable on relationships are rather flat, but her exploration of the complex pull of the umbilical cord makes for compelling reading. As Emily struggles to overcome the grief of her miscarriage, she grapples with what it means to be a mother and what it means to have one. Turns out the ones we’re literally disconnected from are those closest to us.