“It was 1994, the year of bad, low-blood-sugar decisions,” begins Ali Liebegott in her frank, funny and painfully realistic new novel Cha-Ching!

I remember making a lot of bad decisions during my own version of 1994 – and Liebegott’s heroine, Theo, certainly makes her share in this novel – but the author smartly resists the urge to pigeonhole her narrative into a time capsule, aside from the brief date-drop and the fact that we are introduced to the protagonist while she is watching a show that evokes the Fox Network’s decade-long devotion to police chases.