How to Kill Your Husband (And Other Handy Household Hints) (Kathy Lette)*

Poor, poor Cassie. Her husband Rory has left her for their marriage therapist Bianca, and her boss doesn’t think she’s suited to the Deputy Head’s position. Her best friend Jazz’s husband isn’t being terribly faithful either. So Cassie deserves a bit of sympathy, doesn’t she?

No. None at all. Cassie is irritating and neurotic. Rory really is better off even with the sexually free and deeply unprofessional Bianca. As for the Deputy Head position, it’s difficult to imagine anyone less suitable than Cassie. Yes, her rival, Priscilla, is a snide cow. Definitely. But at least you know she’ll work hard and get the job done. Cassie doesn’t treat either her job or her colleagues with respect, and it’s difficult to believe she cares for anyone apart from herself. Even if she really is as useless as she appears to be, she’s not nearly responsible enough for a teaching job. There’s no way I’d want her looking after my children. And my children would be used to incompetent adults because they’d have me.

Jazz isn’t much better. She’s just a whiny, bitchy, horrible person. I don’t blame her husband one bit for leaving her. If I was her husband, the book would probably be called How to Kill Your Wife. (Or maybe How to Kill Your Stalker because I wouldn’t marry her if you offered me free books at Waterstones for the rest of my life. Not that I’d kill her really. That’s just a joke.) Jazz is supposed to be terribly beautiful and a ‘domestic goddess’ (what does that mean anyway?), but I’m not going to start liking someone just because her best friend tells me she’s beautiful. I’m more interested in their personalities. And Jazz’ (or Jasmine’s: Kathy Lette has a tendency to use Jasmine’s full name when denoting a possessive) personality is pretty much nonexistent. There’s just enough unpleasantness on the surface to make you wish someone would come along and kill her, but there’s nothing underneath. She’s so shallow I would call her plastic, but she doesn’t have enough substance to be plastic. Jazz is cardboard.

Their freaky friend Hannah is actually quite interesting at times, but she’s not that nice either. She’d have been great as the sharp, slightly bitchy best friend if Cassie and Jazz had been likeable. Sometimes Hannah can be quite witty, and she is probably an original character as far as the world of chick lit goes. Most chick litty career women end up domesticated, so it’s always nice to read about one who doesn’t, and doesn’t want to be. But Hannah still isn’t nice enough to hold my interest. And I’m surprised she isn’t the one who ended up murdered: if she’d said ‘dah-ling’ one more time I think I’d have screamed.

Bianca is a mixture of the therapist cliché and the typical husband stealer. She’s a bit one-dimensional, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered if the rest had all been properly characterised. She is very funny. The best character in the book is Rory – he’s as useless as Cassie, but he’s quite amusing sometimes. He’s someone who could possibly exist. And you’ve got to admire him really. The poor guy’s married to Cassie, and he’s only had one affair. He’s incredible.

But the main problem with How to Kill Your Husband is that it’s chronically unfunny. It was clearly supposed to be a comedy: the dialogue is fast and snappy, and the characters’ conversations take turns you wouldn’t expect. Lette sets up her sentences and paragraphs as though she’s leading up to a very clever and funny joke – but the jokes never seem to come. There were times when I could see where the jokes were supposed to be, but somehow this book didn’t suit my sense of humour at all. It’s supposed to be the way women talk when there aren’t any men around. If this is true, I’m very glad that most of my friends are men.

And as for the murder – could it be any more ridiculous? To be fair, it is possible to write about a crime that doesn’t work and still create a thrilling piece of literature - Sophie Hannah’s Hurting Distance might not be the most realistic book in the world, but it’s beautifully written, and her characters are a million times more appealing than Lette’s. (Yes, most of Sophie Hannah’s characters are criminals, and even the nicer ones probably ought to be locked up for one reason or another. But Hurting Distance is an involving, intriguing and impressive book. How to Kill Your Husband isn’t.) Lette apparently is very popular, but the best thing about this book is that it’s quite short. And (as I got it 3for2) it was technically free.

I Did a Bad Thing (Linda Green)*****

I’ve read so many books where the heroine leaves her lovely, gorgeous boyfriend for a man who is stronger, more sure of himself, more flirtatious, and with a greater capacity to sweep the heroine off her feet. I usually find this very annoying because for me there’s nothing sexier than a wet drip. Miserable, nervous, pathetic teacher Jonathan is just my type. He’s even got one of my favourite boys’ names. So, watching his partner Sarah being seduced slowly but surely by the sexy, superconfident, highly competent Nick really should have been horrifically annoying.

But it wasn’t. I love Jonathan to bits, and I’d personally choose him over Nick any day. But the fact that Sarah clearly preferred Nick didn’t bother me at all.

Why? Because Sarah and Nick are so ideally suited. She and Jonathan got on well enough, but there’s no real sense of intimacy between them. They seem to love each other, but they’re more like mother and son than lovers. There’s so much chemistry between Sarah and Nick, it’s amazing they didn’t electrocute the whole office.

The book tells two parallel stories about Sarah and Nick, one taking place in the present, and one taking place several years before when they first met. In the earlier story, Nick has a girlfriend: the beautiful, glamorous, bitchy and stuck-up Amanda. In the second story, there’s Jonathan. It has to be said, Linda Green hasn’t written the most original story in the world. But hers stands out. She has a central couple who are great together, and a pair of obstacles, Jonathan and Amanda, who would obviously be so much happier with different people. (Green avoids the cliché of fixing them up: it would have been quite funny, but too neat and perfect an ending.) And, while Sarah and Nick might be perfect for each other, Green doesn’t pretend they’re perfect in any other way.

The two stories of Sarah and Nick’s relationship are really interesting, moving stories, but the one problem with this book is that the stories are almost the same. Both are set in newspaper offices, and it’s not much of a contrast that, in the earlier story, it is Nick with the senior position and the relationship, and their roles are reversed in the later story. It also doesn’t help much that they have different colleagues. Even though Green has again created some wonderful characters – particularly motherly Joan, who belongs in the earlier story – there’s not really anything specific about them that helps you to remember that they belong in one story and not the other. The only character who has really undergone a huge change is Colin: a politician (but a really lovely one) in the first story, and homeless in the second.

The stories are told pretty much in alternate chapters, moving between the past and the present. Green has attempted to create a different feel by writing the first story in the present tense. This is uses effectively to create a greater immediacy, and is presumably used to show Sarah’s more impulsive, idealistic nature when she was younger, landing her dream job and falls in love with her boss. The second story is in the past tense, which perhaps helps to indicate the restraint in both their characters when they meet again.

But, when I was reading it, I found it really confusing to have the story set in the present told in the past tense, and the story set in the past in the present tense. The font was the same throughout, so there were no visual clues. I sometimes forgot which part of the story I was in, or I got confused and thought it was one when it was actually the other.

I did wonder when I was reading the story whether it would not have been simpler if the book had been in two parts, with the past first and then the present. But it wouldn’t have been as exciting if Green had told the story in that way. It is very tense, jumping from the past to the present, and having no idea how things went wrong for Colin; why Nick didn’t just dump Amanda for Sarah (which I’m sure he’d have done in the most sensitive possible way); why Sarah didn’t want to stay in contact with Nick, when they obviously had a very strong friendship.

I Did a Bad Thing is not be the most original, the cleverest or most beautifully-written book on this blog. But Green has taken a well-known plot and made it warm, funny, involving, and somehow just what this sort of book should be. And that’s something too many published authors can’t do.

Angel (Katie Price)***

Not three but four books for the price of two should have been a real bargain. But, when the best of the bunch is Katie Price’s Angel (the others being Katie Price's Crystal, PS I Love You and Everyone Worth Knowing), something has gone very wrong.

Angel is not nearly as bad as you’d expect it to be. Maybe the dire Crystal had lowered my expectations; maybe, after three disappointments in a row, I was desperate for something even vaguely good. But Angel is actually not bad at all. The central character, Angel, is a nice person. She makes mistakes, but you don’t hate her for it – it’s easy to see why the mistakes happen, and it’s clear it’s not going to be easy for Angel to get out of them, but you know she’s going to do her best. She is a little bit shallow and more than a little bit ignorant, but she’s kind and well-meaning, and actually rather sweet.

The other characters are also well-written – Angel’s friend Gemma is supportive and funny, giving great advice without being a total know-it-all; Cal, the guy Angel really loves, is very attractive, but not one of those irritatingly perfect guys you wish the protagonist would strangle. As for the decadent Mickey, he’s obviously a wanker, but he does have the sort of compelling personality that would draw in vulnerable and innocent girls, including those, who, like Angel, are finding the demands of a glamour modelling career tough. Several of the characters who were in Crystal (Angel was written earlier, but I read Crystal first) also make an appearance – Angel and Crystal share the same tough and unyielding agent, and work with the same lovely pair of hairdressers. These three characters are probably three of Price’s best – or ghost writer Rebecca Farnworth’s best, as might be a more accurate statement.

Price has clearly drawn on her own experiences in order to tell the story of the busy and challenging world of glamour modelling. Her descriptions of Angel’s modelling assignments are a lot more interesting than I’d expected, and the book explores the necessary commitment and determination needed in order to become a glamour model, as well as the possible pitfalls in becoming involved with such a career. You can understand – just – why Angel enjoys stripping off for a camera, but Price makes it clear that glamour modelling often isn’t an easy job or a glamorous one.

The one thing that does let the book down is that Price has tried to cram too much into it. Angel’s difficulties in her new job and the effect it has on her personal life would have been enough to fill a book of its length. There was no real need for her to be adopted as well – and, if Price really felt this was important, she could have devoted more space to it. Angel’s meeting with her real mother, which should have been such a big event in her life, is squashed into a few pages. Angel’s reaction to the news that her mother had been traced, and had agreed to see her was not recorded – indeed, Price didn’t mention the meeting until the day when it was set to take place, and Angel only thinks about it occasionally afterwards. It was very disappointing to be left out of what should have been a really important event in the protagonist’s life.

The dialogue is sometimes cringe-makingly awful, where Price or Farnworth appears to have badly misjudged a particular phrase. But other times it’s quite good; even funny in places. And the cover’s nice too. It’s pink.

PS I Love You (Cecelia Ahern)**

PS I Love You is not only a successful novel, but also a successful film. Cecelia Ahern’s first novel was highly acclaimed, and it is certainly a novel of great originality, with just the right amount of tragedy to get Hollywood interested. But it’s not that good.

The idea of it, while certainly very sentimental, is actually really interesting. Holly is grieving after losing her husband Gerry to a brain tumour. She discovers that, before he died, he wrote her a number of letters. She opens one each month, and this helps her to heal.

But the problem is that neither Holly nor Gerry seems very nice. Holly seems more self-indulgent than truly unhappy. And, while grief can certainly affect changes in people’s personalities, it is difficult to see Holly as part of a threesome with the wonderfully mad Sharon and Denise. There are a few flashbacks to what is supposed to be a glimpse of a fun-loving Holly, but all we really know is that she enjoys herself a lot when she’s drunk.

The way Holly treats her elder brother Richard is dreadful. Okay, she grows to understand him during the course of the book, but I was wondering all the way through what Holly’s problem was. Yes, Richard is not terribly sociable, but it doesn’t seem as though he actually dislikes people. He just feels uncomfortable in social situations, which is more than understandable given the way that Holly laughs at him. I think he’s a lovely man.

Then there’s a bit later in the book where Holly passes off her colleague Alice’s work as her own. It’s absolutely dreadful, and I really can’t blame Alice for ignoring her after that. I was hoping that Holly had secretly told her boss the truth, and that this was going to be a great opportunity for Alice, who is a really sweet girl, but I didn’t know Holly well enough to know if she was going to do the right thing or not. All I was sure of was that she can be a selfish bitch.

Gerry has obviously gone to a lot of trouble in order to write the notes, which probably wasn’t easy for him given his illness. He needed to be able to leave the house without Holly’s noticing (which, unfortunately, makes you wonder how attentive Holly really was), so you have to admire his perseverance. But he’s such a bossy know-it-all, and that’s just not attractive.

Gerry is someone who thinks he always knows best. The notes he writes to Holly tell her what to do with her life each month. She’s never that much into his ideas, but she goes along with them anyway, and he’s always right. Maybe if I’d known he was right as soon as the note was opened, it would have been okay. It would have been better still if I’d kind of formed the same conclusions about Holly’s needs just from reading about her and how she was feeling. But Gerry’s ideas just seemed to come out of nowhere, and it’s just annoying. If it had turned out that Holly had strangled him to death, I wouldn’t have liked her any better - murderesses are even worse than insipid lumps - but I’d have understood why she wanted to.

While the characterisations in PS I Love You aren’t nearly as strong as those in Ahern’s later novels, particularly the wonderful If You Could See Me Now, there are still many promising characters. Richard is great. Then we have Holly’s hilarious friend Sharon – stupid and annoying at times, not to mention embarrassing, but a really nice person, with admirable warmth and patience where Holly is concerned. Daniel, who spends his time falling in love with and getting bossed about by the female characters, is just the kind of drip I like. Holly’s sister Ciara is adorable - wayward and independent but somehow very innocent. Ciara is a character I’d love to read more about. Her Australian travels sound fascinating. What’s more, they take place on the other side of the world from Holly.

Crystal (Katie Price)*

The people who think Katie Price (better known as Jordan) must be illiterate because she is a glamour model aren’t necessarily right. Glamour models tend not to be that highly qualified because they start work young. But there is no reason why they shouldn’t be intelligent and literate. If they have a chance at a well-paid career which they think they’d enjoy, why not take it? They can always go and get a degree when their careers are over, when they’re thirty or thereabouts. It’s true that the glamour models I’ve been in touch with seem to be poor at spelling and punctuation, but very few people use punctuation nowadays, and plenty of intelligent people can’t spell.

But the fact is that, although Price’s first novel, Angel, to be reviewed very soon, is actually not bad, Crystal has very little to recommend it.

The reason for this could be that, while Angel could have been strongly influenced by Price’s own life as a model, Crystal is outside her experience. With Crystal, the tale of a girl band who enter a fictional X Factor, Price was, perhaps, being a bit too ambitious. She had ‘ghost’ Rebecca Farnworth to help her with the ‘literary’ (this term is used very, very loosely) side of things, but the subject matter is probably not something Farnworth has experienced either. As a journalist, perhaps Farnworth is more comfortable writing about fact than fiction.

The story is about Crystal, Belle and Tahlia, the three members of a girl band called Lost Angels. They enter musical talent show, Band Ambition. Like Ben Elton in Chart Throb, Price has written about ‘fictional’ judges who are clearly very much influenced by their real X Factor counterparts. Elton’s version of the TV programme is far wittier, but Price’s characters have more depth, and are slightly more believable as people. The girls are also quite well characterised: they’re very different, and, while the clearly underlying tension between Crystal and Belle is easy to see, there is still a bond, however tenuous, between the girls that makes their shared ambition believable.

Belle is a bit of a drama queen, and it’s easy to believe that someone as selfish and hardheaded as Crystal wouldn’t have much patience with this. But the problem is, I’m mostly on Belle’s side. Belle might be a little bit bitchy at times, and her ability to twist the Simon Cowell character around her little finger is annoying, but she is still tame in comparison with Crystal.

Keeping the peace is Tahlia, Price and Farnworth’s best-written and nicest character. It’s a shame that so little of her story is shown. As the least confident of the three girls, her newfound fame is difficult from the start, but she’s not another wannabe loser, screaming for attention. When a story about Tahlia was sold to the paper, I was actually glad - I was looking forward to seeing her taking centre stage in the book. But she doesn’t. Hers is a story with the potential to fill a third of a novel easily, if not a whole novel, but Price decides to stick with Crystal. Unfortunately.

And so there is nothing to do but to wait for Crystal to become a better person, and that takes time. The plot is meandering: once the contest is over: Crystal is shunted from one place to another, and the book becomes less of a continuing story than a series of uninteresting snapshots into Crystal’s life. Not even her romances are interesting. Max is a total bastard, but that doesn’t change the fact that Crystal stole him from Belle. Apparently, Belle’s somewhat negative reaction to this is a sign of her inherent bitchiness, but how would you feel if it was you? Crystal’s other bloke, Jake, is not overburdened with personality, brains, or good taste in women, but he’s still miles too good for Crystal.

Price tries her best to win some sympathy for Crystal. While most of what happens to her is probably deserved, some of it is awful. I’m glad Crystal was able to recover to some extent, but the fact that she’s suffered doesn’t make her a nice person. Crystal isn’t a bad character, but she doesn’t work as a heroine because she’s just a horrible person. Maybe, like Jane Fallon in Getting Rid of Matthew, Price was intending to create an unlikeable protagonist who nevertheless is sympathetic, but this is a very ambitious idea for so inexperienced a novelist as Price, and it just didn’t work.

Everyone Worth Knowing (Lauren Weisberger)*

It’s hard to believe Everyone Worth Knowing came from the person who inspired that wonderful film, The Devil Wears Prada. Lauren Weisberger’s first novel surely must have been so much better written and constructed than this in order for someone to spot its big screen potential – but why would anyone write trash like Everyone Worth Knowing when they were capable of better?

The writing is inaccessible. Weisberger’s style is clunky and amateurish, and sometimes it was a real effort to read it and to understand what she was on about. Parts of it were probably supposed to be funny – the film of The Devil Wears Prada was certainly amusing in parts - but it was so difficult to find the humour in this pile of crap. The story was almost identical to The Devil Wears Prada - it’s about party planning instead of fashion, but both protagonists move into a shallow world; get sucked into it; become very successful, before ultimately deciding it’s not for them. But whereas Andrea in The Devil Wears Prada is (at least in the film) sweet, kind, extremely hard-working and grateful to have the job even though it isn’t really what she was looking for, Everyone Worth Knowing’s Bette is a selfish cow.

Oh, she basically has the right attitude – she knows that it is more important to be a nice person than to be someone who dates celebrities. But the problem is that she not only considers herself a nice person, which she isn’t, she also thinks she’s a better person than almost everyone she meets.

Bette takes real pleasure in disliking her new workmate Elisa, who is actually very nice for a shallow drug addict. While it might be true that Elisa was not hugely welcoming to Bette on her first day at work, she seemed fairly friendly to me, and she was probably very busy. And who says Bette deserves a big welcome anyway? She’s very lucky even to have a job. Just because they’re in the business of party planning, it doesn’t mean her new workmates have to throw a party just because Bette has arrived.

Bette also looks down on her poor friend Penelope, and it’s really not surprising Penelope comes to resent her because I do too. Penelope is sweet and well-meaning, and eager to see the best in people, so it is genuinely sad when things go wrong for her. It’s difficult to feel a great deal of sympathy for Bette when there are much nicer people in the book who are having a worse time than she is.

Bette’s dislike for old university ‘friend’ Abigail is more reasonable, but Bette could still have been polite. For one thing, she shouldn’t insist on calling her ‘Abby’ when she’s said she prefers Abigail now. That’s just antagonistic. She shouldn’t sneer, even if she thinks Abigail sneered at her first. Abigail might be a silly bitch, but, if Bette had shown her some respect from the start, maybe Abigail would have responded in kind. As it is, she’s bringing herself down to what she perceives as Abigail’s level.

Bette does learn a few things from her mistakes, but it’s really too late by then. It’s okay for characters to make mistakes – it would probably be an even worse book if Bette was as perfect as she thinks she is. But Bette has no charm. She’s brittle and spiky, and always thinks she knows best. Jane Fallon got away with writing about a not very likeable heroine in Getting Rid of Matthew, but you do need considerable humour, not to mention writing talent, in order to get away with this, and Weisberger just isn’t good enough.

But one thing I will say for Bette is that she has fantastic taste in men. She quite rightly has no interest in the ridiculous Philip, the celebrity everyone thinks she’s shagging. The man she likes, bouncer Sammy, who won’t take any crap from Bette, is absolutely adorable. The fact that he likes Bette is probably his only bad point. But his affection appears sincere, as though he has seen some very well-hidden depths in her.

As for the plot, very little happens. It’s just party after party. One of the main parts of the plot is the trouble caused by an anonymous gossip columnist. I didn’t guess who that was, but it was fairly easy to guess who else was involved in it.

I bought The Devil Wears Prada from a charity shop because I loved the film, and I don’t believe it can really be as bad as this rubbish. But a glance at the first paragraph says I could be wrong.