Philly Flavors (Part I)

Philly Flavors is the name of an ice cream shop in the Art Museum neighborhood that serves enormous cones of water ice, gelato, and ice cream. In a homesick haze of Missouri summer, I’ve missed it. Since I can’t go there, instead today and tomorrow I’ll share some refreshing literature I’ve read in the past year with a strong Philly flavor.

First off, Sarah Dunn’s readable and intelligent The Big Love is now in paperback. I enjoyed this story of an evangelical-girl-turned-sex-columnist searching for love in Philadelphia. Dunn’s descriptions of a city that isn’t quite as glamorous or exciting as it would like to be are right on, and some of her witty insights are worthy of Jane Austen. Lisa Scottoline’s mystery novel Courting Trouble is good beach reading for anyone who wants a whodunit with a Philadelphia slant. Frothy and quickly paced, Scottoline’s story follows a lawyer who is falsely suspected of murder, and it culminates in a creepy scene during the Parkway’s Fourth of July Celebration.

The Queen of Philly Chick Lit is Jennifer Weiner, who also maintains a great blog. (She writes she hates the term "chick lit" because it’s condescending and paternalistic, and while I agree, I’m afraid we’re stuck with it.) I am tickled to say that, long before Weiner had any inkling she’d one day be posing in lingerie for an Entertainment Weekly photo shoot, during her days as a reporter for the Centre Daily Times, she interviewed me and wrote an article when I won the local Shakespeare recitation competition in high school. Of Weiner’s three novels, her first, Good in Bed is my favorite. I read Little Earthquakes shortly after having a baby, and I thought that her depiction of motherhood in Philadelphia was accurate (even if she did credit The No-Cry Sleep Solution to Dr. Sears, when any sleep-deprived mother could tell you it was written by Elizabeth Pantley). All three novels include realistic Philly details, from the fancy strollers in Rittenhouse Square to the variety of local restaurants. I'm looking forward to Goodnight Nobody, which will be published in September.

For a nonfiction take on Rittenhouse Square motherhood, I enjoyed Andrea Buchanan’s Mother Shock, which I read while pregnant. One of my friends found it too neurotic, but since I’m neurotic that didn’t bother me in the slightest. In many short essays, Buchanan writes about miscarriage, pregnancy, postpartum depression, and discovering who she is as a mother. I’m also grateful to her for founding Literary Mama, an online literary magazine that published one of my poems last April. Another young Philadelphia publication is Philadelphia Stories, a journal of fiction and poetry that has been going strong for the past year.

Coming tomorrow: Solomon Jones, Justin Cronin, and Jonathan Franzen.

Photograph by Padre Denny on flickr.com.