Here's an enjoyable romp featuring three successful young Black women in NYC and the men who can barely keep up. Bennie is a fashion editor on the rise when she meets Jay and falls in love for the first time. He's smart and is getting noticed for his spoken word performances, but he's had a difficult life and a major tragedy in his background, and their worlds might be too different. They break up, get back together, have fabulous sex, and Bennie gets good advice from her friends. There's a lot of beauty-insider caricatures here of women bosses who are recognizable, and reading this 2004 novel seventeen years later is big nostalgic fun too. There's buckets of humor and wisdom about family, work, and love.

Quotes: "Look! Moby's here!" "He looks like a suppository."

"I'm going to tell you a secret. White women love to be around exotic women. It makes us feel like we're privy to a secret." ( )

Excerpt from HomeGirl.Typepad.com:

I've been finished with this book for a while. It's part of my break from "heavy" reading. IT WAS SO GOOD Y'ALL! The "accidental diva", Billie Burke, lives this very glitzy, very enviable life as a beauty editor for a huge glossy magazine. She's a NYC "it girl". I've tried to resist using this description, but it's the best way to describe her...she's like a Black Carey Bradshaw from Sex in The City, only she's still in her twenties. She's beautiful and stylish, her friends are all really interesting and accomplished, her love interest, Jay, is the perfect good-guy with a dark past, lovable, with so much love to give type guy.

FULL REVIEW:
http://homegirl.typepad.com/home_girl/2005/09/the_accidental_.html ( )

Super-intelligent and gorgeous, Billie Burke is a workaholic who hasn't taken a break since she set her sights on the top editor position at a premier beauty magazine. So far, her ambition has paid off professionally, but it has also effectively curtailed her personal life. Now that just might change. Falling headfirst into a scandalous and addictive affair with a man named Jay Lane, Billie has no idea that secrets from Jay's past will emerge and threaten their budding relationship. ( )