Heather McElhatton has written the last word in the chick-lit genre. After this one, we don’t need any more. The Minneapolis writer follows up her best-selling "Pretty Little Mistakes" with "Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Single" (Harper Collins).

For a week I ignored the book by turning it cover facing down so I couldn’t see that wince-inducing name or the annoying cover, which features an ironic photo of a doll. (Do book designers think single women are trapped in perpetual childhood? I’ve seen too many covers like this, although this one is blue; most chick-lit books are hot pink, like the Barbie aisle at Target.) I nearly didn’t read it at all, but the pages are as thick and pulpy as a sheet of Bounty, so I knew I could blow through the thing in a single night. And I’m glad I did — otherwise I would have missed passages like this, about Jennifer Johnson’s co-worker:

God, she’s a pain. I’m trying not to blame her, what with her having evil stepkid issues and everything. I think a woman being forced to watch over another woman’s children is unnatural. On a primal level, shouldn’t a woman want to kill off a rival mate’s offspring? I mean, I know I’m not supposed to say that, I’m supposed to quote some Mother Teresa crap about one world, one love, but frankly, I think getting saddled with bratty twin step-daughters is biologically grotesque. If I had them they’d end up in the trunk of my car.

Or this exchange:

“Hi, Lexi,” I say. “Hey, did you lose weight?”
“Me?” she screeches. “No! I’m like a cow.”
“Really? Dairy or beef? Beef probably, huh?”

Not your typical bodice-ripper, huh? McElhatton is an apt student of the genre, and hits every convention (gay best friend, marketing career, weight obsession, someone else’s wedding). But that’s all in the first five minutes. After that, she sends Johnson into bizarro world.

Jennifer has a dismal date with a pedophile-defending Internet match, obsesses squeamishly over a creepy co-worker’s visible “crotchal bulge,” scarfs a Hot Pocket and suffers an intestinal strike back on the eve of a dream date, who reveals that cruel classmates called him “testicle head” after his sister shaved his eyebrows off when he was a kid.

There’s romance, too, sort of. The book is divided into three sections: Find Him, Hunt Him, Nail Him Down. You know, the goals of every single woman. Jennifer is smart and hilarious and should know better, and I’m not exactly sure why she doesn’t. But this surely is the only title in the vast chick-lit oeuvre that includes the phrase “cat turd museum” and a dazzling litany of emergency room thing-put-up-the-butt anecdotes. Which pretty much makes it the pinnacle of the genre.

And now that it’s been written, dear readers, plow through it, laugh, admire its originality, note its formula plot, and let’s let chick lit become a literary artifact. There are too many books in the world to read the same one over and over again.