Lucy in the Sky (Paige Toon)***

Lucy in the Sky isn’t the best book in the world, but it was the book that made me start reading again. It was my English teachers who forced me to give up: it’s just so hard to enjoy a book when you’re forced to pretend everyone has a sexual repression problem.

Lucy is happily on her way to Australia to see her old school friends, who are about to get married. She receives a text message telling her that her boyfriend James has been unfaithful. Cue shock, horror, and a totally unnecessary vomit scene (as an emetophobic, I have a deep dislike of anything connected to the v-word, but Paige Toon wasn’t to know).

When I got this far (v-scene notwithstanding), I was thrilled. I thought the whole book was going to be Lucy stuck on a plane wondering what kind of man she’s really shacked up with. I thought it was going to be the most amazing book I’d ever read. But Lucy gets off the plane a few pages later, phones James, and he denies it.

Lucy is a lovely character. Her stupidity becomes endearing, and her stomach proves extremely strong as a general rule, despite an inordinate number of drunken nights out. Some of her escapades are very amusing and wonderfully inventive – particularly her description of Lucy’s girls’ nights out. I don’t know how realistic they are because most of my friends are male, but this book seriously made me think about ditching my guy friends and going to find myself some girly mates. The best character is Lucy’s brilliantly scary boss, Mandy – she’s not as scary as Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, but she comes close.

But the men are a bit of a problem. Lucy wonders about the text message for months – but I don’t understand why she’s so bothered. It doesn’t matter if James has been unfaithful: Lucy should kick him out just because he’s a wanker. And it’s not like she’s a good girl exactly. The whole time she’s wondering, she’s also got this flirtation going on with a guy called Nathan – the younger brother of one of the friends who got married. Given the choice of James and Nathan, I’d personally have gone for Lucy’s sweet workmate Chloe, but maybe that’s just me.

Throughout the story, things kept happening that I thought I didn’t like, but it didn’t actually stop me from reading, and I actually ended up enjoying it. Even though I couldn’t stand James, I did want to know whether he had been unfaithful or not. And, while I’m not really sure why Lucy and Nathan are so good for each other (there is the small problem where they live on the other side of the world from each other that is never really resolved), they do seem to make one another happy. There are so many books out there where the hero and heroine spend the whole time having slanging matches. This can work very well – a more restrained version of the slanging match can be seen in Pride and Prejudice – but it’s nice to see the tension in the book coming from another quarter for a change, just giving you the chance to read about two people who click from the start.