New This Week: With Friends Like These by Sally Koslow

The only thing really surprising about With Friends Like These (Ballantine) is how good it is. It could, quite easily, have gone either way.

Author Koslow (The Late Lamented Molly Marx) is an editor and journalist whose byline you will likely have seen if you read women’s magazines at all. (Oprah, McCall’s, Women’s Day and so on.) In short, she has the kind of pedigree that often produces books that are chirpy but empty. Which is why, in the end, With Friends Like These proves to be a pleasant surprise.

The book starts on a distressingly Sex in the City note. Jules, Chloe, Talia and Quincy begin their friendship in the early 1990s, connected by little more than their mutual need for an apartment in New York City, a place where housing tends to always be one of the central issues.

Before husbands, before babies,before life claimed other loyalties, it started with a wish. Each of them wanted a place to return to that they could call home, a nest where they could hatch and polish their dreams.

They didn’t say it even to themselves -- they might not have even realized it -- but most of all they wanted friends.

Despite this less than promising opening, With Friends Like These proves to be funny, smart and engaging, mostly because Koslow’s wit is real and her talent deep. With Friends Like These may not be a deeply memorable book, but readers will have no trouble at all imagining -- and casting -- the film version.