June 2026 Book Review: Single Girls

Book by: John Searles
Review by: Dr. Wendy Hooper-Meletes, Ed.D., owner of Litchfield Books

John Searles is a New York Times bestselling and award winning author of four novels. For two decades John was the top editor for Cosmopolitan, a glossy modern single women’s magazine with outlandish coverlines about men, movie stars, and makeup. During many meetings with editor in chief Helen Gurley Brown, John would pluck his ideas for a novel he hoped to write someday.

In this novel, Single Girls, author John Searles takes on a bigger hurdle to dramatically begin at the dawn of Helen’s childhood, the devastation of her father’s death, and the people who forge her into a legend.

Author John Searles takes certain creative liberties with Helen’s story. He shortens the timeline of when Helen moves from Arkansas to L.A., the women she surrounds herself with at Cosmo as she turns around the flailing magazine conglomerate, and offers a sharp reminder of how unsinkable workplace power dynamics can become intoxicating. In 1965 a new world was possible for a single girl if only she was fearless enough to reach out and grab it. Helen quickly assembles a team of savvy single girls up to the task in the glamorous enigmatic world of women’s magazines and soon their lives become the stuff of magazine covers. Romance and revenge for book editors take a very wrong turn and more.

Single Girls is about Helen Gurley Brown and the women she hired in the 1960s to transform Cosmopolitan into the most talked about magazine of the era. John Searles knew HGB who hired him out of graduate school many years ago. His novel is a love letter to women’s magazines and to her… It is a book he always wanted to write and, unlike his previous suspense novels, it is joyful, fun, funny and full of charm.

Meet and dine with author John Searles on Friday July 17 from 11:00am-1:00pm at Pine Lakes Country Club in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. 

For tickets: www.litchfieldbooks.com/events