Ready for a short, sweet treat? You need The GoMo by Maggie Alderson – ditch the newspaper or your magazine lunch time reading tomorrow and instead devour this short story.

Jess is having her ‘Golden Moment’ –

“…I’ve finally reached my full potential as a woman. Self-confidence and self-esteem from life experience and professional achievement, perfectly balanced with grown-up sexual allure…. The woman completed. I’m having my Golden Moment.”

When drop-dead gorgeous Adam walks in to Jess’s cafe, it’s love at first sight, but her friend Trina has been reading The Rules and warns her to play it cool.

Alderson has dialogue between women so perfectly down pat that I feel as if I could well be reading my own conversations. Jess and Trina’s codes and short-hand remind me exactly of the sort of thing my girlfriends and I *used to* carry on with –

“Being linked to an Alpha Male in a Power Couple with Shared Aspirations was all part of her Master Plan.”

Alderson explores the rituals of modern dating and once again I thank god that when I was dating, Google, Facebook, Twitter and even text messages didn’t exist. It was enough for me to wait by the phone… Yet, despite the fact that we have online dating, mobile phones, email, text messages, Google and Facebook at our fingertips, little has changed – women still get together and dissect every little detail of what a guy said/ didn’t say and did/ didn’t do. I’m fairly certain that my friends and I went through a stage of judging boys by their shoes…

As the main character Jess runs a cafe, there’s oodles of tasty food references in The GoMo. The standout was reference to sundried tomato and feta filo triangles… gee whiz, I love a filo triangle. Here’s a twist on the classic spinach and feta combination – roasted red pepper, spinach and feta triangles (my husband has been quoted as saying “Do you think we could have a meal without peppers?”).

4/5 A nice little reminder of the thrill of ‘courting’.

*I received a copy of The GoMo from Penguin Australia via NetGalley.