SPOONING

Four girls just out of college share a Manhattan apartment; in their spare time, they hit happy hour, hunt for guys and start a cooking club.

Narrator Charlotte “Charlie” Brown, who just got out of college, has moved into an Upper West Side apartment with three roommates. Their combined adventures are related in breathless, ADD-afflicted, yapping-puppy prose. “I am a single goddess, a working girl, a creature like no other,” gushes Charlie, whose healthy sense of self-esteem quickly becomes cloying. In short order, she has become a bona-fide city girl: hanging at the neighborhood bar nightly, cruising for her hot and wealthy Mr. Right and using family connections to finagle a job at a daytime syndicated TV show whose domineering host has many unsubtle similarities to Martha Stewart. (Stephens was a producer at Stewart’s company.) To provide this shambling collection of brain-dead aphorisms and muffled relationship comedy with some semblance of shape, the authors have Charlie and her friends form a supportive cooking club; recipes pop up every now and then to relieve the tedium of the story. Stephens and DeSales prove so inept at making even the narrator of this worshipful ode to pre-yuppie airheads into a coherent character that her friends and the occasional romantic prospect stand little chance of proving interesting.

Some of the recipes included in this debut do sound pretty tasty (especially the Better Than Ben Affleck Dessert), but you’d have to stretch to find anything else nice to say about it.