20 Times a Lady »

Former TV talk-show producer Karyn Bosnak lives in New York City. Her first book, Save Karyn, was an inspiration to shopaholics and women in credit card debt everywhere. 20 Times a Lady is her first novel.

Delilah Darling's magic number was supposed to be twenty. She always thought she'd find the perfect guy by the time she'd slept with twenty of them. But when she wakes up naked in her disgusting boss's bed after a drunken night out, she's filled with regret — and realizes she's hit her self-imposed limit. Unwilling to up her number but unable to imagine a life of celibacy, Delilah does what any girl in her situation would do: she tracks down every man she's ever slept with in a last-ditch effort to make it work with one of them.

A hilarious romp through Delilah's past loves, 20 Times a Lady proves that in the end, numbers don't matter. True love will come when you're open and ready to accept it.

Publishers Weekly

Bosnak, the woman behind the popular "Save Karyn" Web site (she also penned a book by the same title), makes her fiction debut with the tepid tale of Delilah Darling, a woman on the cusp of 30 who loses her job and sleeps with her heinous former boss in an entanglement that's the 20th notch on her headboard. It's a painful realization, as she'd just read in the New York Post, that the average person has 10.5 partners in their lifetime. Fearing she has more than reached her quota, Delilah takes off on a cross-country trip, determined to find "the one" among the 20 of her former lovers. But she soon discovers that the men of her romantic past-an inmate, a rehab patient, a dog-obsessed Amway salesman and a Muppeteer among them-aren't exactly life-partner material. Clever chapter breaks that feature maps and voice-mail transcripts are fun additions, but the story-hobbled by limp humor, razor-thin characters and phoned-in prose-takes too long to find its inevitably happy ending. (July) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.