Back-to-basics chick lit

As hard sells go, there's something a bit no-frills about "Three women, three friends, many, many problems. Just like life, really."

Something so halfhearted you think you might as well phone a friend instead. But don't. Beneath its lacklustre packaging, Stripped Bare is a classy genre piece - solid, polished, back-to-basics chick-lit. Flat-packed, perhaps, but very decently slotted together.

And as cash-ins by minor TV presenters go, it chi-chings with good sense. Lowri Turner (front woman of Looking Good, Would Like To Meet and DIY SOS) isn't well-known or weird enough to have the kind of car-crash cachet someone like Kilroy could command should he turn his hand to fiction.

The reliable turf of fluffy romance is, then, a safe bet. But it's not a cop-out - there's no veil of originality to hide behind should things go horribly wrong.

Turner's chicks are Beth, Olivia and Siobhan, the director, wardrobe designer and assistant producer of a failing home makeover show called On the

House. Each girl is given her own work worries, her own problematic husband (unfaithful, gay, not theirs) and her own grouchy children. Perhaps because their situations are so similar they can tend to blur into one big, mumsie, victimised haze. A flaw, you'd think, but in fact this fuzziness stops you getting too weighed down by each woman's predicament. That the girls are funny and nice, and the boys aren't, is all you need to know.

The one snag in Turner's otherwise smooth little tale is the media satire. A comment on celebrity is now such a staple ingredient of girly fiction that an insider's take isn't much of a spin, but Turner barely swivels.

Digs at real stars are mixed in with nods to slightly fictional shows (Big Sister, Every Morning) so you're never quite sure whether she's being sly or just inaccurate. And the bitching itself can be soft and offthemoney - a rake-thin presenter with a largish head is described as looking normal on screen but resembling ET when naked. The head bit works, but since when could you call ET svelte?

On the whole, though, Stripped Bare, like all good chick-lit, is more sane, touching and balanced than you'd imagine. Leaving aside the bewildering way her characters always ask for "a wine" (as in "Can you get me a second wine?"), Turner reveals a good ear for dialogue and some unexpected turns of phrase. Getting dressed for a reconciliation with her husband, Beth considers that "the last thing she wanted was for Richard to think she'd made an effort. That would be like placing an egg and chips in front of his ego."

Touches like this make you think that if Turner strayed from the instruction manual she might knock up something rather interesting.