Billed as a companion book for women “who have more experience with recipes for disaster than recipes for romance,” Amy Cameron’s Playing with Matches attempts to capitalize on the impulse to anecdotalize the infamous (but hilarious) Bad Date, for later consumption by a table full of ballsy, Blahnik-wearing, Manhattan-sipping girlfriends.

Cameron gathered her stories, which span the years between 1950 and 2004, through a series of Bad Date Dinners she hosted, at which her guests shared courtship horrors over comfort food. These accounts were supplemented by responses to an e-mail request for tragic dating stories. They range from the raunchy (a man moving determinedly “buttward” in bed) to the demure (a less than manly man crying into his date’s shoulder at the movies).

The series Sex in the City, to which this book owes a great debt, was refreshing and popular because it was shocking and shallow and proud of it. But these somewhat shoddy attributes, once they’ve lost their initial go girl sheen, quickly morph into something cheap, lewd, or just plain silly. It’s not that there isn’t some funny, strange, even aw shucks material in Cameron’s collection – it’s just that it’s all been done to death.

Moreover, there is a workaday quality to the writing that lacks the irony, lasciviousness, and comic timing some of the more outrageous yarns might convey if spoken whilst waving a cigarette or lipstick wand in punctuation. There are many instances here of a table of women “erupt[ing] in laughter” over yet another botched attempt at bedding (or eventually wedding) a man with “luscious lips” wearing a “T-shirt that slithers over his pecs in a way that’s almost mesmerizing.” But on the page, the stories are less funny than flat, and sadly, the prose never attains the satiric snappiness of a David Sedaris, or attempts to unearth the oddball Canadiana in its situational dating dilemmas.

As Carrie Bradshaw might say – of a lover, a cocktail venue, or a stale bit of personal history – it’s time to find a new angle, ladies, or at least change it up a little