Babe In Toyland
By Eugenie Seifer Olson

   Twenty-five-year-old Toby Morris is an art school and works at Toyland in New Jersey. Toyland is a major manufacturer of children’s toys and Toby’s job is to design the instruction sheets that go into the toy packages. Toby’s days are filled with quirky coworkers developing toys that will soon make an appearance in stores. While Toby enjoys some of the kudos of working for Toyland (free toys and a cool-sounding job title), she tires of working with moody engineers and scrambling with coworkers to meet deadlines.

   Toby is bored, and looking for some excitement. She has no man in her life other than her platonic roommate Michael, who gives music lessons to children and is a borderline hypochondriac. Basically, Michael is a wimpy guy, and while Toby likes spending time with him, he is not the man for her. Toby tunes into the local weather report on television one day and time stops, figuratively, when she sees J.P. Cody, a handsome and dashing meteorologist. So begins the plot of Babe in Toyland.

   Toby begins sending innocuous and flirtatious love poems discussing the weather to J.P. Cody. Michael thinks that she is crazy, although Toby has the support of her brash, overweight, partying friend Kerrin, who urges Toby to continue the one-sided correspondence to J.P. Cody and to discover if J.P. Cody is interested. As the plot slowly develops, we read about Kerrin’s antics with her new urologist boyfriend, Len, and Toby trudges along the daily grind at Toyland. A handful of other characters enter the picture, but fail to add substance to the story.

   While Babe in Toyland has colorful characters (some memorably named “The Third Sex” and “The Head Wound”) and reading about toys and Toby’s experiences at Toyland were interesting, as I turned the pages and continued to read, Babe in Toyland meandered and tended to lack direction.

   Though chick lit books are not typically intended to impart a message to the reader or lead to profound thinking, Babe in Toyland could use some oomph in the plot department. It dragged throughout the middle of the book. A brief plot twist and hasty wrap-up of Toby’s circumstances at the end of the book may come across as too pat to satisfy some readers.