About Us:
Rian Montgomery, Site Owner, Webmaster & Reviewer:
Rian is your average 28-year old brainiac, (or so she believes), singleton, book-loving person who resides in Nashua, NH. She is originally from Southern California, (she grew up in Norwalk, CA and last lived in Irvine, CA), but moved to the east coast in the summer of 2002 for various reasons. (The main reason being that she couldn't stand Southern California any longer!) What prompted her to do a site devoted to chick lit is that she simply couldn't find one anywhere on the 'net that was exclusively for chick lit, other than specific publishers.
Rian also enjoys techie computer type stuff to the extent that she is a computer geek. She created this website herself basically with text editors - no FrontPage or Dreamweaver for her. It started out in 2003 as a small, graphically inept version with a black background and bright colored text and links. It's evolved into quite a large site. Rian is completely self-taught when it comes to programming and web design. When not reading chick lit, Rian reads philosophy (currently Plato), technical books, non-fiction, and pretty much anything with words. Currently she works as a web designer/coordinator for a local Nashua company.
Rian:
Angela McQuay, Reviewer:
Angela McQuay is the editor of a business magazine located in Lincoln, Nebraska. She is an avid reader of many genres and regularly contributes to a number of book review sites. Angela is also an aspiring writer and is currently working on a novel. She lives in Lincoln with her husband, two dogs and one cat.
Angela can be reached at amcquay2000@yahoo.com.
Angie:
Tiffany Telles (Howell), Reviewer:
Over the course of her youngish life Tiffany Telles has graduated from college, gotten married, and become a mom to two rambunctious pugs. She enjoys collecting vintage Nancy Drew novels, discovering new Bay Area restaurants, reading voraciously, watching Sex and the City reruns and spending time with her basketball crazed husband.
Tiffany can be reached at Tiffy038o@yahoo.com.
Kelley Hartshorn, Reviewer:
Kelley Hartshorn is an instructional designer for a major Midwest university. Since her job title is a little vague and no one seems to know what it means, she is often compelled to add, "I design online graduate classes," an equally non-descriptive statement, but the best she can come up with to avoid launching into a lengthy expose on the finer points of her career.
She also owns a teddy bear store with her husband, an endeavor that keeps her quite busy. Between managing the website, participating in neighborhood business activities, and tracking down new products, her weekends and many evenings are spent at the store. You can visit her store's website at www.bumblesbears.com.
In her spare time, there is nothing she likes more than plowing through a pile of books. She was first introduced to this lovely pasttime as a child, when she discovered Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. Since then, her tastes have evolved to include chick lit, romance, science fiction, and quite a bit of non-fiction.
Katie Bodnick, Reviewer:
Katie Bodnick currently lives in New York City, though she grew up in Danvers, Massachusetts. She loves both adult and teen chick lit. Her favorite chick lit includes "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" by Ann Brashares, "Summer Boys" by Hailey Abbott, "Shopaholic and Sister" by Sophie Kinsella, and "The Undomestic Goddess" by Sophie Kinsella.
Katie was an English major at Brown University and will be entering a yoga teacher certification program this fall. You can reach her at bearette24@hotmail.com.
Margaret Sanford, Reviewer:
Margaret is a 30 something network administrator who lives in Somerville Massachusetts with her husband and two-year-old son. She works for Emerson College in Downtown Boston.
She realized in 2000 that she had missed the Bridget Jones phenomenon and read both “Bridget” books within a week of each other. During a badly timed trip to Ireland (She went the week they closed the country because of hoof and mouth disease) she found herself with loads of free time. A fateful trip to a used bookstore led her to Jenny Colgan’s Talking to Addison and Marian Keyes’ Lucy Sullivain is Getting Married. From then she was hooked on chick lit. She has been enjoying the explosion in the genre and loves to read new books and reread her favorite books.
She is thrilled to be writing reviews for ChickLitBooks.com. She’s looking forward to all the great books coming out this fall.
When she’s not writing book reviews, she writes an active blog at http://maggii.blogspot.com.
About this website:
This website features chick lit book reviews and information, as well as forums where you can express your opinions on books and chat with authors. We also have author interviews, reviews, new and upcoming book information, a huge chick lit book database, and more.
We currently have six reviewers on the site: Angela McQuay, Tiffany Howell, Kelley Hartshorn, Margaret Sanford, Katie Bodnick, and Rian Montgomery. We also have guest reviewers who submit from time to time. If you are interested in submitting a review for the website, please contact Rian.
Unlike some other "chick lit" type sites found on the internet, we actually really and truly do read and love chick lit. Any reviews found in our review section are written by us. Unfortunately there are a growing number of websites that people created for profit who claim to read the genre, and feature reviews from other sources, but that don't really read the books themselves. With us, what you see is what you get: Real, honest reviewers who simply love chick lit and the written word in general, and want to share the information with as many people as possible!
Please note that although we feature ads for books, which are paid placements, we are firm in our belief to review books thoroughly and honestly. It doesn't matter if an author paid money for us to advertise their book on the site or not: we will still honestly review their book. Period.
Site Credits:
This website has been viewed and tested in many browsers, on both Microsoft Windows and Linux Operating systems. You should have no problem experiencing or getting this website to display correctly. However, the best screen resolutions to view this site in are 800X600, 1024X768, and anything higher. Should you have any problem viewing or using this website, please don't hesitate to let us know.
This site was created by Rian Montgomery using Gedit (a text editor in Linux), The Gimp (a graphics program in Linux), and OpenOffice.org, a word processing program. The forums were designed by Simple Machines. The absolutely amazingly awesome Amazon feed CGI script was created by Mr. Rat. All book graphics are copyrighted by the author/publishers. Most website content (excluding reviews written by others and the amazon feed information) was written by Rian Montgomery.
Many thanks and gratitude are expressed to Andrew, who has provided invaluable help and advice for many areas of this website.
