Ahh summer. My favourite reading season. You can find me, avec book, curled up under a fan flipping pages or at the end of the dock dangling my feet in the water. Right now I can’t stop recommending Lindsey Kelk’s The Single Girl’s To-Do List, which came out this week. It totally soothed my light and frothy reading craving while satisfying my obsessive affection for list-making. So I keep passing on the gospel. 

Kelk’s flirty and fun story follows Rachel Summers, whose lovely list includes a great job, great flat and great boyfriend. Until she gets dumped. Her best friends fly to her rescue to help her write a whole new set of To Dos. These include who (not what!) she should be doing and where she should be flaunting her newly single self; Toronto! Not only will you see yourself in Rachel, you’ve totally partied and hung out where she does too. The pages pretty much turn themselves as Rachel (with her faithful friends in tow) takes Toronto and embraces the best parts of being single. This is the literary equivalent of a cocktail with your best friend, dancing around your bedroom in full makeup with nowhere to go or buying some new cute accessory for no reason at all. It’s not a cliché if the endorphins are real, right? 

Light as it may be, the novel is an ideal read for every Toronto girl. For my married girlfriend, it’s total escapist fun. My recently single girl got up and hit one of the book’s Toronto hotspots. And for me? Maybe I’ve written a to do list of my own… 

British born, Brooklyn-living Lindsey is totally making Toronto her go-to city; she’s also guest editing The National Post’s Afterword blog this week! Check out what the author has to say on the topic of chick lit and about Carrie Bradshaw and pick up your copy of ‘The Single Girl’s To-Do List’ for your summer reading fun. 

~ Zoe Shapiro