Jill A. Davis' debut novel, Girls' Poker Night, is not particularly about a girls' poker night, any more than it's about anything else. Davis, a former newspaper columnist and writer for Late Night With David Letterman, writes like a professional comic: short, punchy, quick to change tracks or jump for a punchline, and prone to focus on little details rather than the big picture. Poker Night's first-person protagonist, Ruby Capote, is also a newspaper columnist, an observational humorist who writes about her surroundings while leaving herself out of the equation as much as possible. Leery of commitment and looking for more money, more excitement, and an escape from a just-not-perfect boyfriend, she applies for a job at a New York paper and begins a bantering correspondence with its editor-in-chief, Michael Hobbs. Once she's ensconced at the paper, she and Michael circle each other cautiously, both clearly hoping for a serious relationship, but Ruby is both mercurial and ambivalent, while Michael seems naturally hesitant in the face of her sardonic caviling. The book sometimes feels a bit too much like Bridget Jones's Diary, but Ruby is considerably funnier than Bridget's protagonist, and much less of a self-absorbed pill. Ruby's insecurities are mostly subconscious, and Davis is wise enough to reveal them through humorous events, instead of allowing her to whine directly to the reader about her problems. Girls' Poker Night reads a bit like a series of succinct humor columns; it consists entirely of short, pithy chapters, each summarized by a minimal excerpt from the chapter, often just a single keyword. Over the brief, breezy course of the book, Ruby sees a psychiatrist, jockeys with offensive coworkers, reluctantly visits a psychic and a vagina-obsessed women's-empowerment guru, and ultimately deals with her uncertainty about Michael and the necessary risks that make life possible. She also hangs out with her girlfriends and watches them deal with their own issues, which is easier than confronting her own. Ruby's quirky but one-dimensional friends are part of Poker Night's central flaw: The book often comes across as too casual, too slight, and too glib about the human affairs it seems to try to take seriously. Still, Davis comes to grips with significant issues without wallowing in them, and her witty prose and cute anecdotes make Ruby's life far more fun to read about than it would be to experience.