Angels (Marian Keyes)***

After reading Marian Keyes’ wonderful Anybody Out There, I was really excited to find out there were other books about Anna’s sisters. There are actually four in all, and reviews for Watermelon and Rachel’s Holiday will be posted when I get round to writing them. Angels tells the story of Maggie, the second of the five sisters. Maggie has grown up being the good girl, but she suddenly starts questioning whether this is something she really wants. So she leaves her husband Garv, and heads off to Los Angeles where her best friend Emily is trying to be a Hollywood scriptwriter.

It’s not a bad book at all, but a disappointment in comparison with the others. Maggie is, at least for me, by far the least likeable and the least amusing of the sisters. While it does sometimes take a while to learn to like Keyes’ characters, Maggie is someone I never really liked.

She’s just not a very nice person. She spends most of her time in Los Angeles getting drunk and sleeping with various people, and it never seems anything other than desperate and embarrassing. She’s self-obsessed, thoughtless, and a total slut. Or that’s the way it seems. Okay, yes, she thinks her husband’s having an affair, and she has just lost her job, and that’s enough to make anyone go a bit mad, but Maggie seems so neurotic and selfish all the way through the book, it’s much too easy to believe the affair is in her imagination and the sacking was deserved.

It has to be said, she gets into the bad girl lifestyle with no trouble at all, and maybe she seems happier and more alive when she’s being bad, but not really in an attractive way. And you just think: great, she’s found her true calling. She’s happier now. Let’s just leave her there and read another book.

Once we start getting flashbacks to Maggie’s life before she left Garv, her behaviour starts to make a bit more sense, and I wasn’t totally unsympathetic to her after that. But instead of her history seeming like a reason for her to go to Los Angeles, it seemed more like a reason for her to go home. As soon as possible. Ideally before she does something else stupid. She’s not going to solve the problem by sleeping around. She really isn’t.

Keyes is usually magnificent at characterisation, and her books are usually full of wonderful people, but there aren’t really any here. Maggie’s friend Emily is amazingly saintly, considering the crap she puts up with from Maggie – surely the last thing she wanted was Maggie moving into her flat and making demands on her time when she has a script to write. Maggie somehow gets involved in all aspects of Emily’s life, muscling in on her work and her social life, and ends up monopolising them completely. The friendship between Maggie and Emily never quite rings true for me. They don’t really have much of a rapport, and they barely seem to share any common interests besides getting drunk. Emily is a workaholic and Maggie is a sexaholic, and it’s difficult to see why they’re friends.

The flashbacks provide a bit of plot, but the main story seems more like a series of adventures. All Keyes’ books are full of adventures, but there’s usually a sense of heading towards something. But not here. The best parts are when Maggie’s bonkers family gets in touch.

But the rest of the series really is great.