Sophie Strops...

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas**

2011-02-07T00:03:00.001Z

Everyone seems to be making a huge fuss about this book and I think if Arsenal goalkeeper Manuel Almunia likes it, it can’t be that bad.

But I didn’t really like it. It is a great idea but I feel so much more could have been done with it. The boy in the striped pyjamas, for example, is hardly in the story at all. There are lots of really interesting characters in the book but most of them just don’t appear enough to do more than whet your appetite (many don’t even do that much).

Also some of the characters’ stories don’t seem to be resolved. In some ways this is realistic because in real life, stories often aren’t resolved. Sometimes people stay the same for many years, and it doesn’t matter that they’re unhappy, they just keep going. John Boyne gives us many tantalising glimpses of places and people and situations but he doesn’t go into any detail, which is disappointing and frustrating.

The writing is fine but again, it could tell you more. The descriptions are limited. Boyne might say something interesting but he doesn’t say enough to give you a full picture. The book is written a style that’s suitable for children so maybe that’s why Boyne doesn’t go into details – he wants to keep things brief in order to keep people’s attention. Or maybe it’s just that his main character is too young to take in a great deal of what he’s seeing.

The childish language in this book would probably appeal to young children but I really don’t think this is a children’s book. There’s a lot of subtlety which I think a lot of children just wouldn’t pick up on and the subject matter doesn’t really seem appropriate for children. I do think people often underestimate children’s ability to cope with horrifying situations – a lot of the time, children cope with it a lot better than adults. They might think a situation is exciting and cool whereas an adult would understand it more fully and might be more likely to be frightened. But you don’t want children, or anyone else, to think the happenings in this book are in any way cool. They’re not.

The main character is a nine year old boy called Bruno. He lives in Berlin with his family but then they suddenly have to move somewhere new. It’s some time before Bruno even works out which country he’s in (a surprise in itself) and I had no idea of the name of Bruno’s new home because the only name we ever know is Bruno’s unsuccessful attempt to pronounce the name. On reflection, I think perhaps I know the real name of the place (I won’t say what it is because that will spoil part of the story) but it took me weeks to get it.

Bruno really is quite an annoying character. Unless he has some sort of speech impediment, I don’t really understand why he has so many problems with pronunciation. In many ways, he seems a lot younger than nine. He insists on referring to The Fury instead of The Fuhrer which is not only very annoying but also a bit dodgy linguistically. If he was speaking English, it would be a more natural mistake but he is speaking German. The German for fury is Wut. Not very much like the word Fuhrer. I really can’t see how Bruno is going to get those words confused. True, there is the German word Furie which refers to the mythological Furies and you could certainly make parallels between them and Hitler (although the Furies are, of course, female) but you wouldn’t expect a nine year old to know the word. If you don’t quite understand a certain word when it is said to you, you’re more likely to hear it as a word you know.

There are also various phrases which Bruno likes and which feature in the book far too often. Like ‘Best Friends for Life’. I don’t mind the capitals so much, German nouns (although not adjectives) all have capitals anyway but the way it’s repeated over and over again is very annoying. It would have made more sense if Bruno was younger but he seems a bit old to insist on repeating particular phrases over and over again, even in his head. Later in the book, he forgets the name of one of his Best Friends for Life but I knew what his name was! Bruno had told us enough times.

Also, it was slightly surprising that Bruno’s older sister Gretel was still playing with dolls at the age of twelve. There’s nothing wrong with it but it is very unusual. She’s not generally immature for her age – she clearly fancies the eighteen year old soldier who spends so much time at their house. The new hobby she takes up towards the end of the book isn’t very typical of twelve year old girls either. But maybe children were different then.

The end is great though. I wouldn’t say I like it but it is wonderfully chilling.

T.J. and the Hat-Trick (Theo Walcott)***

2011-01-02T21:19:00.002Z

When I found out that one of my favourite Arsenal players was writing a series of children’s books, I was naturally eager to read them. In some ways, of course, I was completely jealous because I’d have loved to write a series of books about a football team and it is quite sad in a way that Theo is more publishable than me simply because he is famous – even if my writing was a million times better than his, it would make no difference.

But at the same time, I was sure I’d love the book. It’s about football, it’s by Theo, what more could I ask for? (Apart from Theo becoming eligible to play for Wales.)

It’s great to see a footballer writing about his experiences in football without doing something as ridiculous as bringing out an autobiography. Theo is twenty-one years old but I’m sure that if he expressed interest in writing an autobiography, the publishers would snap his hand off (which would have been a problem if Theo had followed his original career plan to become a goalkeeper). But he hasn’t written an autobiography. Instead he’s written some books which are fiction but which are very much based on his own life and experiences (his central character, T.J., even has the same nickname as Theo did as a child - his middle name is James). Young footballers who admire Theo can learn from the books and also enjoy reading them but he hasn’t attempted to stretch his experiences into 200,000 words or more, a book which his younger fans might find a bit difficult anyway.

In this book. T.J. has just started a new school. I think he’s about ten. On his first day, he meets pupils including star (female) striker Tulsi, the enthusiastic but fat Jamie, and Rafi, who has an allergy to keeping still. T.J. discovers that the school doesn’t have a football team – or even a football field – as none of the teachers like P.E. (I’m not sure it’s legal to have a school without P.E. lessons but I can’t say it was something that overly worried me, I think no P.E. lessons is a great idea. Get rid of all P.E. lessons and just have football, rugby and hockey teams. And completely ban netball. That would be perfect). But then new teacher Mr Wood joins the school. He loves football and he sees that T.J. and his friends really enjoy playing so he starts up a school football team, with T.J. as the star goalkeeper.

It’s not the most original story in the world and parts of it aren’t very realistic but it doesn’t matter. Walcott’s books aren’t intended to be great works of literature. They’re just fun books that encourage people to read – and I think that’s very important. A lot of the people who read this book will dream about becoming a footballer and in a way that’s exactly what the book is. Many boys and girls will have had a fantasy about the school football team coming together against the odds and achieving the impossible. Here is the fantasy in book form.

I don’t think it matters that the book isn’t realistic. Why do most people read books, if not to enjoy the fantasy? The book is exciting, full of action and a very satisfying read. It’s also well-written although I’m not sure how much was written by Walcott and how much by Paul May but the writing is good. The style is direct and easy to read and the football matches are well-described without being overly technical.

The characters are good too. They’re all distinctive yet it’s easy to imagine firstly that they’re all mad about football and that although T.J. and his friends are all quite difficult from one another, they all get along. Tulsi is slightly annoying because it’s such a strange name - I don’t think there’s any need for her to be called something so unusual. She is the only girl in the team so she would stand out even if she had a normal name. Maybe it’s a nickname, possibly based on her surname, but in that case you’d expect the teachers to use her real name. But apart from that, the characters have good names although perhaps Walcott goes overboard slightly in his efforts to be politically correct. There are a number of football-playing children who don’t have British names, probably more than is realistic. But maybe he had to do that.

Theo has written three more books about T.J. and I’d definitely be interested in reading them. They won’t be the most challenging books I’ve ever read – but if they were, I probably wouldn’t mention them on this blog. I love Emma but there’s no way I’m reviewing that on here. It would only show how stupid I am and everyone already knows how good it is.

Sparkles (Louise Bagshawe)****

2010-12-18T14:42:00.001Z

I’ve always admired Louise Bagshawe’s writing style but haven’t particularly enjoyed her books so I was thrilled to find Sparkles. In some ways, it has a lot of similarities with the other Louise Bagshawe books I’ve read. Like Lucy in Tuesday’s Child, Sophie has to learn to be a lady (although we only really see her nonladylike self in flashbacks) and like Lita and Becky in When She was Bad, Sophie finds herself in charge of a business. She’s never done anything like it before but she discovers she has a real knack for it.

But in this book, everything really works. Bagshawe has created a fascinating and exciting multi-layered story, full of twists and turns you almost never see coming. Her characters are also great. Sophie at first seems a bit distant and too concerned with keeping up her aristocratic appearance but the more you read, the more you get to know the vulnerable and sexy woman inside.

Also with a big part to play in the book is Sophie’s son Tom, who is spending his university days shagging and failing his classes (so in other words he’s a completely normal student). But when he fears for the safety of his inheritance he decides to come home and take charge. In the process, he meets Judy, once Sophie’s husband’s secret (at least as far as Sophie was concerned) lover, who is now showing an interest in Tom.

Judy is a complete bitch who likes to tell herself she only cares about being rich but it’s very difficult to hate her. No matter what she does, it’s difficult not to sympathise with her and also to admire her determination and inventiveness. And I smiled more than once when she found herself accidentally being really nice to Sophie. Judy is a great villain because you want her plans to be thwarted but you do kind of want her to end up as happy as she can be without making the other characters suffer.

At the beginning of the book, all Hugh really wants is to buy Sophie’s business but he too turns out to be someone completely different from what I was expecting. He has a business of his own and he always works really hard at it but gradually he realises there are more important things in life.

Then there are scenes featuring the mysterious and murderous Vladek, who is in some way connected to the stories in ways we can partly guess – although you don’t realise the full extent of this until the end of the book. At one point he changes his name to Yuri and this is how his girlfriend refers to him but my friend told me that calling someone Yuri is like calling someone by their first name and surname in English so Yuri’s lover should really call him Yura. But maybe I misunderstood and in any case, Vladek/Yuri is a bit weird so maybe Bagshawe was being really clever and making him get it wrong on purpose.

This is a wonderfully written book, with beautiful, evocative descriptions and exciting dialogue. Maybe it’s not a book I’ll read again but it’s a book I’ll remember – and maybe that’s more important.

A Minor Indiscretion (Carole Matthews)***

2010-11-29T19:32:00.001Z

Ali has been married to Ed for years and she’s always thought she was happy. But when handsome young artist Christian falls in love with her, she’s more than a little bit flattered. Christian is nearly young enough to be her son yet he makes her feel beautiful and loved.

When Ed finds out, he’s just a little bit miffed and kicks Ali out - although one benefit of the new arrangement is that at least he doesn’t have to be quite so embarrassed about his own feelings for his scary workmate Orla. And come to think about it, his youngest son Elliott’s nursery school teacher Nicola is kind of hot too.

Meanwhile Ali sets up home with Christian and his young housemates Robbie and Rebecca, who happens to be Christian’s ex-girlfriend. Christian is kind and sweet and attentive and although he is just a big kid, he does make Ali feel very happy. In addition, Ed’s brother Neil is trying and failing to chat up Ali’s sister Jemma, even though she prefers married men.

In many ways, this book was great. I love the idea of a thirty-eight year old mother of three sharing a house with her toy boy and his mates. I also love how all the single woman around seem to be throwing themselves at Ed now he’s newly single. It was also quite hilarious the way Neil and Jemma clearly liked each other a lot but keep fucking things up.

But I wanted to see more. I wanted to see more of Ali trying her best to get on with Robbie and Rebecca, two people who are completely unlike her, rather than just telling us that Robbie was okay and Rebecca was a bitch. I actually thought Rebecca was mostly amazingly nice to her under the circumstances. How would you feel if you were woken up in the middle of the night by the girlfriend of the man you love needing a place to stay? I think it says a lot for Rebecca that she didn’t kick her out onto the street there and then.

It’s an amazing and original situation with the potential to be really hilarious, as well as giving some very different people the chance to get to know and learn to appreciate each other. But there just wasn’t enough of the parts of the book that interested me most. The book does have some absolutely hilarious moments but I couldn’t help feeling that Carole Matthews missed an opportunity here.

Then towards the end, something really major and shocking and life-changing happens and in a way it spoiled the book. First of all, this book is a comedy – it has some underlying serious messages in it but on the surface, it’s a very funny comedy. So to bring this big event in near the end seemed really inappropriate and strange when you’ve spent five-sixths of the book laughing.

Secondly, this big event is key in helping the characters to decide what they want from life. This is fine and realistic. But I kind of feel the end of the book should be about the characters’ working out what they really want and although it’s not unrealistic that it should take something really major to help them decide this, it does in a way make everything else in the book irrelevant. This big event means it doesn’t matter what they’ve learned about themselves and other people. All that matters in the end is who copes best in a crisis. And I don’t see what that’s got to do with deciding whom you really love. There’s no way I’m dumping my boyfriend for someone competent.

Even if I agree with how things stand at the end of this book (which to be honest I’m not completely sure I do), I’m sure there must have been a way of working things out that was more convincing, more satisfying and more in keeping with the tone of the rest of the book. And if Matthews wanted something big and dramatic, maybe she could have made the story into a serious story instead of a comedy. It was like something terrible was happening and I was still waiting for the punchline.

Not many of the characters were likeable but I did find them interesting. Ali seemed a bit moany and obsessive and embarrassing but I genuinely wanted things to work out for her and I was interested in how she was going to make changes in her life. Matthews’ writing ensured that even though she was unfaithful pretty much from the start, she wasn’t the villain of the piece. She was just feeling lonely and unloved and then she met someone who made sure she didn’t feel that way anymore.

Ed was even worse. I really feel for the poor kids. He seemed desperate to prove his masculinity and the way he treats Orla and Nicola (and Ali) just isn’t very nice. It doesn’t matter how forceful and determined to get into his pants Orla and Nicola are (in very different ways), it’s still not very nice of him to shag both of them. At least Ali waited until Ed had thrown her out before jumping into bed (or rather into the bath) with Christian. But it was interesting watching Ed trying to work out which one he liked best. It seemed like he changed his mind all the time. Maybe Matthews had to write him this way in order to ensure that Ali didn’t look bad but it was hard to sympathise with him much – although he was certainly very amusing.

Christian was just adorable. He’s sweet and well-meaning but a bit useless. He does do some awful things (really quite seriously awful, not to mention illegal) and he does seem scarily immature for a twenty-three year old, even by my standards. He seems more like a sixteen year old, maybe even younger, who wants to be a grown-up and in some ways has a more grown-up outlook than most people his age but stick him in the grown-up world and he doesn’t have a clue. But his feelings for Ali seem warm, genuine and romantic. He tries really hard to make her happy. It’s just at the same time he’s trying equally hard to make himself happy.

But my favourite character, Sharon, was hardly in it. She was the tart Christian met at the nightclub on the same night that Ali was thrown out by Ed. Sharon is just so amazingly nice and caring. She just wants something to eat and it isn’t even her house but she can tell Ali’s upset so she asks if she’s okay and offers to make her a cup of tea. Even when she realises Ali is essentially her rival for Christian’s affections, Sharon is still really nice to her. And why shouldn’t she be? Nice people come in all shapes and sizes, including as little slags. The other characters in this book could learn a lot from her. And so could I.

It’s funny how little things can annoy you in a book – and often it’s not the writer’s fault at all. At one point, Matthews referred to ‘a turn of turtles’ and I got really excited because I happen to know the collective noun for turtles is a bale of turtles. But I looked it up on Google just in case and unfortunately turn and bale are both correct. So instead of showing off how clever I am for knowing the real collective noun for turtles, I instead look ignorant for only knowing one of the terms. And that’s even more annoying than someone getting it wrong.

Birthday Girls (Annabel Giles)****

2010-11-04T16:10:00.003Z

So I've failed slightly at posting every Sunday without fail...

This is a very cleverly-written and interesting book with a most unfortunate opening sentence which even more unfortunately comes true. In detail. Let’s put it this way, if I’d read the opening sentence in the shop, I would not have bought it. Emetophobes beware.

Birthday Girls follows the story of six women on their birthdays, ranging from ten-year-old Scarlett to Constance, who is sixty. They don’t all have their birthday on the same day but it follows the six woman over the course of just over a year so Scarlett is eleven by the end of the book. Four of them are in one family, the other two are from a different family but one of the male characters is sleeping with a woman from each family so they’re all kind of related in ways they discover as the book progresses. They also have various acquaintances in common – it’s quite fun when various minor characters start popping up in different places.

The book is divided up into sections with each section taking place on a particular person’s birthday. Most of each section is told from the point of view of the birthday girl although by the time you get to the final section, which tells you about Constance’s birthday, the POV jumps about a bit more as all the stories gradually resolve themselves.

It’s a really interesting way of telling a story and it’s also one that works perfectly well for the story – or stories – Annabel Giles tells. I don’t know if the idea for the plot or the narrative structure came first – often when the narrative structure is the first idea, it can be difficult finding a story to fit it and when the plot comes first, it can be equally difficult to shoehorn it all into something with such a rigid structure. But the two fit really well together.

I also like the characters. They’re all so completely different and in some ways they live in different worlds but the connections between the characters are still convincing. Scarlett can be a bit annoying (she’s a bit young and cute) but I really liked the other characters. Some people might find Sophie a bit weak, wet and embarrassing, Della certainly has her bitchy side, Constance seems a bit mad and Millicent, until you know the full story, can seem very stupid, desperate and a bit of a doormat, in a snobby sort of way (if you can imagine such a thing). As for Jessica, she is a bit of a sad wannabe and no-one in the book seems to like her.

But I really liked all of them. Even Scarlett isn’t that bad. Sophie is sweet and loving, and very brave in her way. Della’s determined independence is both admirable and moving because you can tell she’s hurting under the surface. Constance is quite mad but delightfully intrepid and with-it. Millicent is an amazing woman, with great strength, intelligence, courage and patience. And I had a lot of sympathy for Jessica, who finally has to accept she’s not a big star who’s loved by millions. It’s a very sad story and I always felt she was more a victim of circumstances than actually being a horrible person. It’s like being a star was all she knew how to do.

There are problems with the book. Sometimes the birthdays can end on a bit of a cliffhanger and you might never find out what happened next because the story has jumped forward a few months and while the event was hugely important at the time, it has paled into insignificance by then. Also the big final twist at the end was something I saw coming a mile off. I think if I’d worked it out very near the end, it might have had more impact but as it was, I had enough time to come to the conclusion that it was far too coincidental that things worked out as they did and it was a bit of a soap-opera moment and the book might have been stronger without it.

I did enjoy it though.

The Wedding Day (Catherine Alliott)***

2010-10-18T04:10:00.001+01:00

Catherine Alliott is brilliant about writing comedies about rather stupid women and also brilliant at writing stories that really make you feel for the characters. But I’ve read three of her books now and all her characters seem fairly similar. The stupid heroine is in love with one man but then she meets another man who’s really horrible to her, then she starts having feelings for him instead. Actually, it’s the plot of pretty much any Mills & Boon although Alliott’s writing is a million times better than most Mills & Boon writers. So it is possible to read a number of books with exactly the same plot without getting fed up with it. But with this book, I found myself wishing for a bit of variation.

It’s not as though Alliott can’t do character. In this book especially, she has some great secondary characters. Annie, the central character, and her fiancé David might lack originality but David has a wonderfully mad and vague but terrifying and formidable aunt called Gertrude. Annie’s older sister Claire is always busy, bossy and competitive, just the sort of person I’d usually find really annoying but Alliott gives her a surprising vulnerability. The publisher who is interested in Annie’s book doesn’t appear in person but he’s a great character too. Then there are various friends and neighbours who are fascinating and amusing and Alliott takes the story off on endless twists and turns. And even when you know just where the story is going, she often throws in a surprise.

I also liked Annie’s ex-husband Adam. He does have a bit of a maturity problem (not to mention a fidelity problem) and you can’t blame Annie at all for leaving him - you actually kind of wonder why she didn’t do it sooner. But I did kind of feel he had some good qualities and I really wanted him to learn from his mistakes and end up happy, although maybe not with Annie. He was the first character in the book I really cared for and wanted to know more about. Some of the other major characters at that point seemed like lost causes and Adam didn’t… although I think Annie would argue with that.

Other characters however don’t quite work. Annie’s daughter Flora is a strange mixture of a stroppy teenager, a very young child and an adult. In some ways, this is completely realistic as everyone has different sides to their personality and there are times when you feel young and times when you feel old (not that I’ve ever felt old). But the different parts of Flora don’t quite form a coherent whole.

Annie, David, and Matt (Annie’s Other Man) don’t quite work for me either. The problem is that Annie is a bit unhinged. There’s nothing wrong with being a bit unhinged but I found it slightly worrying that she was getting married. She hardly seems to know David, she has little or no interest in the wedding (although she has somehow managed to convince herself she can’t wait) and seems to have no idea what she’s getting into. I felt as though I was older than her (she’s in her thirties so she’s much older than me) and that freaked me out a bit. I’m not used to going around feeling older than people. It always worries me to find someone, even in a book, who is considered a capable and responsible adult (unlike me) yet is obviously in need of someone to take care of them, be it temporarily or permanently. I really wanted to find Annie, look after her a bit and sort her head out. (Annie is probably now feeling very glad she doesn’t exist.)

This book also includes something I really hate to find in books. No, I don’t mean vomit although there is some and it wasn’t very nice but it could have been worse. What I also really hate is when one (or more) of the characters in the book is a writer and you have to read their work. Alliott makes us read some of Annie’s book. It is so cringe-makingly awful, it should probably be quite funny but the fact a publisher is interested in the book kind of spoils the effect. And there’s definitely a bit too much of it. But it is very cleverly done and there is a reason why Alliott makes you read it so I suppose she gets away with it.

David seemed like a perfectly lovely man but I didn’t really know what he was doing hanging around with this madwoman, let alone planning to marry her. He’s a doctor so I thought he must be setting himself up as her carer or something. Alliott does address this so she gets away with that too but it’s a good thing the book isn’t any longer. Towards the end of the book, you understand why Alliott has done certain things that just don’t make sense at first but until I found out why, I found these parts of the book very annoying.

As for Matt, he seems a little bit creepy. I can’t blame him for sneaking into Annie’s holiday home in the middle of the night, he did honestly think it was his holiday home. But shouting at Annie, getting her name wrong on purpose in insulting ways and trying to force her and her teenage daughter to leave the house immediately and go to an expensive hotel seems a bit much. Annie forgives him (she’s way too nice, she lets people walk all over her) but I still haven’t.

Alliott writes so well though, it was impossible not to become emotionally involved in the story, even though it took me a while and I might have given up on it if a) I didn’t have a blog or b) I didn’t know from experience that Alliott is such an emotionally involving writer. I wasn’t happy at all with the ending, it actually seemed completely wrong, if not dangerous and I really think Annie is in serious trouble. But if you ignore the last couple of chapters, the book would have a really exciting and interesting ending. The way Annie gets to know the characters in ways she hasn’t been able to before, the way she finds out about and comes face to face with their innermost secrets, the way she really does seem to learn from the experience and grow up a bit, made this book a (mostly) really moving and satisfying read.

On Chesil Beach (Iain McEwan)****

2010-10-10T16:49:00.004+01:00

I hated Atonement so much, I was reluctant to give Ian McEwan another go. But he’s my boyfriend’s very favourite writer in the whole world (except me) so he told me I had to try On Chesil Beach because I’d love it. I was quite annoyed when he turns out to be right but at least it meant I didn’t have to suffer like I did with Atonement.

One of the things I hated about Atonement was that Ian McEwan copied bits from other sources. I don’t know if he’s done the same thing in On Chesil Beach or not but in a way I don’t want to know. I really enjoyed it and it will spoil it a bit if it turned out not to be an original work of fiction.

It certainly seemed original. It’s set in the fifties. Florence and Edward are on honeymoon. It’s their wedding night and they’re both virgins so they don’t know what to expect. Edward can’t wait (typical man) but Florence is a bit freaked out by the whole idea of it. It starts off with them eating their first meal alone as a married couple, then they go into the bedroom. Then we start seeing a series of flashbacks. We hear about the first time they encountered one another and the time when they finally met (these are not the same thing). We see how their relationship progressed from there and a bit about their contrasting home lives. We discover Florence went to music college to study the violin and Edward went to university and got into brawls.

The parts of the book set in the present (the wedding night) are told in chronological order but the rest is told in quite a random way. However it is very effective. The more you read, the more you unravel, the more things start to make sense. It’s only annoying when McEwan has left you at a very exciting point and then he goes off and talks about something else instead. But a lot of good authors do that.

Edward is a bit of a strange character. He turns out to be a very different character from how he seemed at the beginning of the book. He’s very polite and slightly reserved towards Florence so I thought he was quite a gentle sort of person. Then it turns out he likes getting into fights. Edward as a character is full of surprises but McEwan doesn’t reveal Edward’s character in an unrealistic way. I had no trouble believing he really was as he was being described. I wasn’t sure I liked him but I did find him very interesting.

Florence I identified with quite a lot. At first, I thought she was naturally nervous about her wedding night because she didn’t really know much about it but it turns out she is quite repulsed by the whole idea. I find this completely reasonable. I love my boyfriend and we’re very happy and, well, use your imagination, we have been together for nearly two years. But the idea of having his urinating apparatus inside me isn’t one that gets me particularly excited. And the thought of him… exploding all over me is a bit ewwww when you think about it. It’s not that I don’t get excited, it’s just I get more excited when he’s got his clothes on (or, well, my clothes on). So I really felt for Florence and McEwan described her feelings really well.

I liked the parts about music too. Often when people write about music you can tell whether they actually know anything about it or not. Like there was one book with a character who wanted to play a particular flute piece slowly. Reasonable in theory but that particular piece you have to play really fast because you can’t take breaths in the middle of the phrases. Then you get the occasional violin with frets and or a clarinet with a double reed which really does get on my nerves. (The violin does not have frets and the clarinet has a single reed.)

But I had no trouble with Florence’s being a really good, professional standard violinist. There weren’t many descriptions of it but there was nothing that stood out as ridiculous. Maybe she spent a bit more time practising her scales and arpeggios than she needed to – you do need to practise them a lot but you get to practise pieces too - but it wasn’t so much it was actually unbelievable. The descriptions of the Wigmore Hall were also excellent. It has been refurbished at least once since the book and the only place I’ve been backstage is the Green Room but it was mostly possible to imagine the Wigmore Hall, read the descriptions, know exactly what he was talking about and have no doubt that he really was talking about the Wigmore Hall.

Some of the sentences might have been just slightly longer than they needed to be but only if I’m being really fussy. I actually really liked McEwan’s use of language. It was sort of gentle, like the waves undulating near Chesil Beach. At the very start McEwan showed a slight inclination to sneer at his characters but after that he really seemed to be inside their heads rather than laughing and pointing.

There isn’t much dialogue. Most of it is descriptions. Usually this sort of thing annoys me as I love dialogue but this book seemed right without dialogue. It’s about two people who have a lot of thoughts, feelings and memories they haven’t shared – and to an extent can’t share - with one another. When a conversation is described, it’s not necessarily the words that are spoken that are the most important thing. So I really like the book as it is.

Chesil Beach is a fascinating location for a story but to an extent it’s wasted because Chesil Beach is one of the few places in the book that isn’t described in detail and also really the only part of the book where the words used in conversation become more important than the setting. There are probably many exciting stories that could be set on Chesil Beach and nowhere else but on Chesil Beach but the book On Chesil Beach could in theory have been set anywhere. There doesn’t even need to be a beach at all as far as I can see. Anywhere outdoors would do.

So in some ways I wish McEwan had set his story somewhere else as now I think writers will feel discouraged from using Chesil Beach as a setting even if they wrote a very different story because the book is so famous. But at the same time, Chesil Beach is an exciting, magical place and just the fact that it’s really there gives the story something extra.

The Other Woman's Shoes (Adele Parks)*

2010-10-01T00:36:00.005+01:00

Adele Parks is a very popular and successful writer so I was really expecting to enjoy this book. And, to be fair, I did enjoy the first page and a half. I absolutely loved the opening line. It wasn’t an especially witty or original or exciting line but it did mention the words ‘Earl’s Court station’ so naturally I was hooked.

I also quite liked the central character, Martha. True, she wasn’t enjoying being at the tube station, which immediately shows you she’s a completely different person from me but I could identify with the not liking stairs part. Also, getting stressed over going to the hairdresser's is exactly the sort of thing I’d get stressed over (if I ever went to the hairdresser’s) and I can definitely relate to not wanting to create a scene. Unfortunately with me, scenes get created all by themselves but I can understand Martha’s not wanting it.

The blurb tells you that sisters Martha and Eliza have split up from their partners and Martha wants fun and Eliza wants a husband. But I don’t think the blurb should have told you that. The blurb should really tell you about something that happens near the beginning of the book. The blurb is your taster, the thing you’re waiting for when you start to read the book. You don’t really want to be waiting half the book for it to happen.

It’s not until about halfway through that the blurb becomes even slightly true. Martha has no interest in fun for ages and even when she is she’s more interested in the provider of the fun than the enjoyment itself. As for Eliza, she never really at any point wants a husband. She does trawl through Martha’s address book in search of a suitable man but it seems to me that all she really wants is a shag.

But that’s a problem with the blurb and Parks probably isn’t responsible for that – although if there was enough excitement in the story leading up to these events, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered what the blurb said.

One of the most important things for me in a book is the characters. I want to like them. At the very least, I want to be rooting for them. But that didn’t really happen. Martha got on my nerves so much and some of the things she does made me cringe with embarrassment. Usually, I don’t even notice when someone has done something embarrassing but seriously, I just wanted to shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see what the crazy woman was going to do next. I’d be lying if I said I’d never done anything embarrassing, everyone does it sometimes but Martha is (I hope) so much worse than me.

Martha is also completely self-obsessed. I accept that when your husband leaves you it’s probably a bit of a shock and you might well spend months weeping and wailing but after a while I stopped feeling sympathetic and I just wanted one of the other characters to shake her. The problem isn’t so much that she’s upset, that’s natural (although I’m sure she’s milking it at least a little bit) but Martha isn’t just upset, she stops showing even the smallest amount of consideration for anyone else.

I don’t usually mind when characters have emotional breakdowns. I actually rather like it. The feeling of being drawn into someone’s crisis can (at least when it’s fiction) makes very enthralling (if not strictly enjoyable) reading. I don’t mind too much when it happens in real life either. Most of the people I know have tried to kill themselves and I don’t get annoyed about that. With Martha, it just seems like self-indulgence and attention-seeking. There is no real sense of sadness in Martha’s words or actions – my sympathy was for the poor people who have to put up with her.

Even when Martha meets Jack and starts having wild sex with him, she doesn’t change. She’s still needy and demanding. I don’t blame Eliza for being convinced that Jack’s just with her for the sex. The way she behaves with Jack is so embarrassing at times, it actually hurts (I don’t see what was wrong with the Crunchie though) but it’s the way she treats Eliza that really bothers me.

Eliza, like Martha, has just lost a long-term partner, Greg. But whilst Michael has (perhaps understandably!) walked out on Martha, Eliza has taken the decision to leave herself. So she goes to her sister Martha’s house, discovers Michael has walked out and has to spend the next few months looking after Martha and her children. Martha doesn’t even consider that Eliza might be upset too and Eliza just has to push her own feelings aside and pretend everything’s fine.

Just because Eliza wanted to leave, it doesn’t mean she’s not going to be hurting. She probably did love Greg at one stage, even if she doesn’t now so she’s still lost someone she loved. And even if she’s completely happy to have left him, her life will still have changed quite a lot. That must be a lot to cope with even if you don’t have to start babysitting your sister, not to mention your niece and nephew. Maybe Martha’s problems serve as a timely distraction for Eliza but Martha really doesn’t give her much choice in the matter. Martha comes first and it seems as though she feels Eliza’s problems don’t matter. (She does kind of realise quite near the end that maybe she’s been a bit selfish but it’s a bit late by then.)

Eliza isn’t as bad as Martha. She does seem to be a very kind and patient person. But to a great extent, she’s hardly in the book. You don’t get much sense of her personality except what other people tell you. Eliza is just Martha’s live-in babysitter with almost no life of her own. Either she’s comforting Martha or she’s trying to shag one of Martha’s friends. It’s not much of a storyline.

I do like Martha’s boyfriend Jack though. He seems like a really nice, kind guy but at the same time he isn’t a total drip. Which is a shame in a way because I do like my drips but it’s not me who has to sleep with him. I can believe a lot of women would love him as he is. He’s a bit of an unrealistic character but it’s not completely impossible there are men in the world like him. Unlike Eliza, I got the impression he actually like Martha as a person – although fuck knows why.

Then there’s the dialogue. When something bad happens in real life, I think a lot of people start talking in clichés because they’re really struggling to put their thoughts into words. But when people start talking in clichés in a book or on TV it can just end up being really funny and that spoils the atmosphere a bit. Parks’ dialogue reads like EastEnders. To begin with, I didn’t mind it so much as it was making me laugh but after a while it stopped being funny and just became annoying.

The dialogue wasn’t the biggest problem though - a lot of the time there wasn’t any dialogue. Sometimes Parks will just tell you what happened without getting into all the details of what could have been a very interesting conversation. There are also a lot of anecdotes about past events which is fine in moderation but when it happens a lot, it gets in the way of the story. She’s also one of those writers who tells you what you’re supposed to think of each character. I’d rather make up my own mind really but to be fair she does say some things I agree with. I don’t agree that Martha is a wonderful, lovely, giving, kind person but I can’t argue when Parks says she’s being embarrassing.

The book also seemed to try a bit too hard to mislead the readers. It’s fine to disguise a situation a bit, for the author to describe in a way that makes you think one thing when the truth it something different. But Parks doesn’t just hint, she tells you fairly directly what’s going on, only to contradict herself later on. Sometimes I actually found I was reading back, wondering if I was going mad or something. Instead of thinking ‘oh, of course that’s how it is’ I was thinking ‘That’s not what you said before, look’.

I won’t say too much about the ending. Not that I especially want to encourage anyone to read this book but all I’ll say is that if I’d liked the characters, the ending Parks chose would have been the ending I wanted most. But that doesn’t make it the right one. In the short-term, it’s satisfying but in the long-term, I think they’re heading for divorce.

But finally, I must say something about the title. It implies a sort of role-swap for Martha and Eliza but that is another thing that never really takes place. Martha starts going out clubbing (yes, at her age!) but this isn’t so much Martha turning into Eliza as Martha trying to be her teenage self. Eliza does end up doing some of Martha’s motherly duties but that’s only because they’re pretty much forced on her.

I’m sure there are some good things about this book but the only times I weren’t bored were when I was really annoyed.

Girl with a One Track Mind (Abby Lee)***

2010-08-24T14:36:00.006+01:00

Abby Lee is obsessed with sex. Completely and utterly obsessed. She can’t even look at a man without thinking about his cock. Sometimes catching a sight of her naked reflection in a mirror is enough to turn her on because she can’t help imagining what it would be like if there was a naked man with her.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with girls being obsessed with sex. Whatever makes you happy. Except she’s not happy because she’s not getting enough sex. There’s nothing wrong with it though. And good for her for being so honest about what she wants.

You could call Abby a tart with a heart – but that wouldn’t tell you very much. Besides, I don’t think she is a tart. Maybe I’m wrong but for me tartiness suggests an element of unnaturalness. More about being seen as someone who has lots of sex rather than a desire actually to have it. Abby is one of the most completely natural people I’ve ever known of and the more you read, the more you see how much more there is to her than sex.

She is also an incredibly nice person. She’s caring, a good friend, and while sex is very high on her List of Important Things to Do, she does care about personality too and she isn’t so completely desperate she’d consider shagging either her best friend’s boyfriend or one of the random tossers who notices she has breasts and feel compelled to point them out.

She can even talk about how intelligent she is without making me want to throw the book across the room. Because she is intelligent, without a doubt. Extremely intelligent. And I worked that out long before she talked about her college grades. Maybe she doesn’t always know what she wants but as soon as she realises she doesn’t know what she wants, she starts using her brain to work out how to get it. Amazing woman. And I’m not just talking about her ability to have constant multiple orgasms although that is undoubtedly amazing too. (I don’t think I’ll ever look at Holloway Road in quite the same way again.)

Lee is a fantastic writer. She’s witty and self-deprecating and she has a lovely turn of phrase. It’s quite amazing how she can describe sex and masturbation and penises and nipples (male and female) in so many different ways and (at least for a while) keep it interesting. As well as writing a thoroughly amusing diary, the book is also interspersed with Comparisons between Big and Small Cocks, and guides for How to Behave at One-Night Stands and What Not to Do if you See a Girl in a Sex Shop. All useful stuff and she makes it funny.

I was a bit surprised though to realise she’d reached her thirties without going to a sex party, experiencing S&M or even kissing a girl. Even I’ve been to a sex party and been chained to the wall as a man kissed me (and I do mean just kissing) and I’m quite innocent really. As for kissing a girl, I’d be lying if I said I’d never done that. Once in a while a girl just jumps on me and as most of them were a little bit mad (well they’d have to be really!) it wouldn’t be a good idea to stop them even if I’d wanted to.

But when you think about it, Abby devotes so much of her life to sex already. It’s hardly surprising really if she hasn’t had the time to be bend backwards over a pommel horse and be soundly whipped (I have bent back over one with my clothes on but I kept hold of the whip and no I didn’t use it on myself, I don’t think self-harming is a very good idea). Why try something new that might be crap when she could be doing her favourite thing in the whole world?

But she literally does spend almost the whole book writing about sex (whether it’s with a man, a woman, one of each, a whole group or with herself) and once you’ve read 20 pages at a time it gets a little bit boring. Get a hobby, woman. Another one, I mean.

And really, anyone who spends quite that much time with soaking wet knickers, for whatever reason, really should consider incontinence pads.

Warning: don’t read this when you’re trying to eat breakfast. If there is one oral activity I love it’s eating and nothing kills the appetite like a pair of wet knickers.

I still love Abby though. I can’t help it, she’s just so lovely. Not to mention sexy. And I bet she’s helped a lot of randy girls to feel a lot more normal.

Jelleyman's Thrown a Wobbly (Jeff Stelling)***

2010-06-14T20:42:00.003+01:00

I actually bought this book for my boyfriend but he was working on Christmas Day (I’m not sure whether to write LMAO or AWWW but I’ll go for AWWW because I do like him quite a lot) so I started reading it and then I wouldn’t give it back to him for ages because I enjoyed it so much. It’s not a brilliant book in that it’s probably not going to appeal to people who aren’t football fans or those who don’t have the right sense of humour to appreciate the book’s comedy. But if you’re a football fan and you like jokes that are often dirty (both of which definitely apply to me), this is probably a very good book to read.

It’s not all dirty jokes. As the title suggests, most of the jokes are based on words and language rather than schoolboy sniggering. But unfortunately, there’s so much football in the book, so many incidents of grown men behaving like (extremely funny) teenage boys, this isn’t the sort of book I’d recommend to my mum, even though she really likes linguistic jokes as a rule.

And I love the way the ‘Jelleyman’ in the title of the book just happens to be Welsh footballer Gareth Jelleyman. So it actually took me a while for me to realise the connection between ‘Jelleyman’ and ‘wobbly’ because I was so excited about a Welsh footballer having his name in the title of a book. But I got it in the end.

I do have to make one big major criticism of something Jeff Stelling says at the start. The book is based on a show called Soccer Saturday, in which he and several other panellists watch football matches and when appropriate they shout and groan and try not to swear based on what they’re watching. Whenever there’s a key moment in a game, Stelling asks the relevant panellist to give a report on it. Only, you never get to see the matches – you just get to hear reactions and analysis.

Stelling says that someone who has never seen Soccer Saturday won’t appreciate the book. And this, I’m afraid, Jeff, is a load of bollocks. I have never seen Soccer Saturday in my whole life and I found the book not only comprehensible but hilarious. What’s more, I really want to watch Soccer Saturday and the only reason I don’t watch anything on Sky Sports is because my parents don’t have it. I could get it if I paid for it but it will probably take quite a lot out of my £70 a week. So maybe I’ll stick to Match of the Day, The Football League Show and Late Kick-Off, which have most of the good bits on and don’t require you to pay anything extra.

Being ignorant of Soccer Saturday was not however completely without its disadvantages. In some ways I’d have liked it if the book had taken a more chronological format. This would have given me more of an idea about how the series has progressed over time, which panellists were around at the same time, what the football situation was at that time, things like that. But on the other hand, as Stelling devotes a chapter to each regular panellist (including the ones that aren’t regular anymore), you really get the opportunity to get to know them all a little bit. And that might not have happened to the same extent if it had been chronological and all the anecdotes about them had been dotted about all over the book. But that small quibble certainly didn’t stop me from enjoying the book very much.

I would like to give it more than three stars. In terms of enjoyment it deserves more than that but I do feel this is a hilariously fun book rather than a great piece of writing. But maybe it would seem great if it was printed in a more conventional typeface. Certain fonts just look amateur which probably lowers my opinion of the writing because it’s less easy to read. And it probably would do even if it was used for Pride and Prejudice so Jeff Stelling didn’t have much of a chance.

The Forgotten Garden (Kate Morton)*****

2010-05-17T01:35:00.003+01:00

I loved the first Kate Morton book I read, The House at Riverton, so as soon as I saw she’d written another book, I bought it straight away. It’s another multi-generational story, covering more than a hundred years. Cassandra, her grandmother Nell, and a lady called Eliza who is an important part of Nell’s childhood all have their own stories which unfold as you go through the book.

It’s an amazingly complicated structure but Morton does it brilliantly. The chapters jump around between the times but the characters she creates are so strong, it’s very difficult to become confused. The story starts when Nell dies and she leaves Cassandra a house in her will. (There seems to be a bit of a theme about non-English people inheriting houses in England, see When She was Bad if you don’t believe me). Cassandra lives in Australia and as far as she knew Nell has also lived in Australia all her life – Nell actually brought up Cassandra after her tarty mother dumped her – so she’s quite surprised to discover Nell has a house in England. Cassandra travels to England to see the house and to try and solve the mystery of who Nell’s real parents are. At the same time, you read about Nell trying to solve the mystery herself and then you get to see the mysterious Eliza growing up and eventually coming into contact with Nell.

It took me a while to get into the story. The characters – apart from Eliza, who first appeared a short way into the book – were not immediately as likeable and interesting as the characters in The House at Riverton. This book is to a great extent more plot-driven than character-driven – which would usually not be a positive trait but it didn’t matter in The Forgotten Garden. The plot is so fast-paced and exciting, full of twists and turns, you don’t really have space in your brain to worry that the characters aren’t brilliant. As the book progresses, it becames more and more difficult to put it down. Sometimes you can guess in advance what’s going to happen but even when you’re right things are never quite as you expect them to be. And I love how Morton will mention characters in one plotline, only for them to pop up later in the past or future. It’s all so cleverly done and I can’t imagine how much time Morton must have spent putting it all together.

Eliza is an authoress so the book features three of the fairytales she wrote. Usually I hate it when you have to break off from reading the main story in order to read something written by a character. But I couldn’t get annoyed this time. The fairytales were so beautifully told and original too – and they weren’t exactly irrelevant as far as the plot was concerned.

The whole book was wonderfully written. The language Morton uses always sounds so beautiful. One of the most beautiful users of language I have ever read – maybe not right up there with Jane Austen but like Adele Geras she’s not far off. Morton is one of the few writers where I can see in my mind what she’s writing about. Even when she’s spending ages describing something without anything happening it doesn’t matter. I can’t get bored because there’s just too much to enjoy, whether it’s the images she’s creating, the sounds of the words or just the fact that anything could turn out to be a clue to help you solve the mystery.

I just hope Kate Morton writes some more books.

When She was Bad (Louise Bagshawe)***

2010-04-13T19:49:00.005+01:00

There’s no doubt that Louise Bagshawe can write. She writes extremely well. Her descriptions are detailed and vivid. I often have trouble ‘seeing’ what writers are describing but it was easy to picture what Bagshawe had in mind, even though she was writing about places I knew nothing about, including some she could have invented for all I know.

Her characters are interesting, her dialogue is witty and you’re never going to get them confused. It’s mostly a serious book but it’s certainly not without humour. When Lita, her main character, goes to work for an advertising firm, Bagshawe describes advertising campaigns that are good or bad, successful and unsuccessful. And she does it convincingly. Her advertising campaigns actually sound like advertising campaigns. When Lita has an idea that is hailed as brilliant by the other characters, I’ve already decided for myself that it’s a great idea. (Okay I have no interest in buying the products but that’s probably more to do with me than the writing.) The plot at times seemed more like a series of episodes but there were plotlines that went all the way through the book and at times it really was enthralling.

So why didn’t I like the book?

The main problem was that I didn’t like the characters. Lita, a Bronx girl who becomes a famous model and then a top advertiser, is cold, hard and on some occasions just nasty. Bagshawe tries to give the impression that she needs to be nasty in order to survive and maybe there’s some truth in that but it never really feels as though Lita is putting on an act.

Also, everything comes to her too easily. Yes, she works her butt off and she is clearly (and believably) intelligent. But it’s not always easy to sympathise with successful characters. From a very early stage in the book I realised that whatever happened, Lita was going to land on her feet, probably within the next few pages. Not only that, she was going to end up somewhere even better than where she was before. So I very quickly stopped worrying about her.

There is another important main character called Becky. She doesn’t appear in about the first third of the book but from that point on maybe just under half the book is from her point of view, half is from Lita’s and there’s a little bit from various other characters. I did like Becky at first. I did feel some sympathy for her when she arrived at the English house she inherited, only to be made to feel very unwelcome by the snobby relatives living in the house at the moment. But then later Becky becomes unrealistically intelligent and competent, full of ideas about things she didn’t have a clue about before. So in the end she’s just a slightly warmer version of Lita.

Their relationships are also rather unconvincing. There’s a total twat called Rupert who dupes Lita and nearly manages to dupe Becky but it just didn’t ring true for me how someone as intelligent as Lita was so completely taken in. Then Lita meets a couple of other men, neither of whom I liked, before finding one who just happened to be right for her. Not that he ever seemed right for her but he was an improvement on the others.

The relationship between Becky and the guy she likes is great at first. I loved the way they disliked each other on sight, yet it was clear they really fancy each other. Then there are lots of arguments and misunderstandings and very occasionally a very short amount of time (maybe two seconds) when they’re actually enjoying each other’s company. But then it gets a bit unrealistic and it’s never really resolved between them.

Another thing I didn't notice myself but which seems worth mentioning is that the book is full of errors (click the title of the review and it should take you to the Amazon reviews). Lita ages five years in the time it takes Becky to age one year. There are references to a song and to linguistic phrases that weren't around at the time when the book is set. I don't know for sure whether this is true as I'd have to read the book again and I don't want to do that but I thought it was worth mentioning. And well done to the reviewers for paying enough attention to the book to spot things like this.

I have another Louise Bagshawe book on my shelf waiting to be read – and I will read it. But to be honest, the thing that interests me most is whether it has a character called Victoria in. In both of the Bagshawe books I’ve read (the other is Tuesday’s Child), there’s a total bitch called Victoria. They’re not the same person. So what’s she got against Victorias? (Although I can’t think of anyone called Victoria I actually like…)

A Compromising Position (Carole Matthews)***

2010-03-28T02:33:00.004+01:00

I like Carole Matthews’ way of telling multiple-viewpoint stories. I think she’s the only author I’ve ever found who’s had one first-person narrator and various people in the third person. It works well in the Chocolate Lovers series but it’s even better in this book. Maybe it’s because Emily is such a big character, you get used very early on to the fact that she features both as “I” and “Emily”. In the Chocolate Lovers series, first-person heroine Lucy is barely mentioned in the section from other people’s points of views but Emily is central to everything that goes on in the book.

It took me a while to get to like her. She spends a lot of time early on telling us how her friend Cara really isn’t normal. She does have a point about that. Cara is very New Age and into spells, massage and dreadlocks. But considering Cara has just come to Emily’s rescue by giving her a place to live when her boyfriend posted a saucy picture of her on the Internet, Emily probably should have been nicer about her.

Besides, it’s not as though Emily is so very normal herself. On the very first page of the book, she is wailing like a banshee in public. I might have been more forgiving if she was a natural crybaby but she manages to be very brave for the rest of the book even though her life is full of disasters. So the banshee wailing seems like attention-seeking to me.

Also, while I haven’t really delved into the sex lives of most people I know because I’m really not interested, I shouldn’t imagine most women spend their bedroom time dressing up in Saucy Santa outfits, writing Ho Ho Ho on their bottoms, and allowing their boyfriends to photograph it. She wasn’t to know that he was going to put it on the Internet and that her bottom was going to turn into one of the Internet’s most-viewed pages but still, I think most people wouldn’t do it in the first place. And if I’m wrong about that, I think I’d rather not know about it really.

When Emily says she’s a normal person, it’s difficult not to laugh. When she says she’s organised and competent, I found it hysterical. And then I found out she was a teacher… now I’m not saying teachers don’t or shouldn’t have a sex life but you just can’t take this book seriously.

A Compromising Position is loads of fun and Matthews really keeps you guessing. I had no idea who was going to end up with whom. Emily and Cara are both in love with Adam, whose ex-wife Laura is married to Barry but seems more inclined to share her problems with Adam. Emily’s ex-boyfriend Declan is also keen to get back with Emily, at least when he’s not enticing Cara into someone else’s hot tub.

Then there’s Chris, who is such a total typical lad, I was just waiting for him to fall in love. The fact he insisted on carrying a picture of Emily’s bottom around with him and kissing it made me wonder if he might fall in love with her. I quite fancy him actually. At least he knows what he wants from what girl (though it probably helps that he wants the same thing from all of them) and he’s honest about it. I don’t want to sleep with him though. I just want to look after him. So I’m not sure we’d get on. Then there’s this guy called Sebastian, who has connections to almost all the main characters but they don’t know he knows all of them. If they had known, this book would have been a lot shorter.

It is very funny the way Adam and Emily fall in love with each other at first sight (not that it stops Adam from shagging Cara and worrying about Laura, or Emily from considering taking up with publicist Jonathan Gold) without realising that they kind of know each other already. Adam knows Cara has a friend called Emily whose bottom has been on international news (he has seen a photograph of her but presumably he didn’t really look at her face) and Emily knows Cara fancies a guy at her work called Adam. But then they have a chance meeting in a bar when Emily’s dyed her hair (and isn’t flashing her bottom) and they don’t really talk. They just drool and Adam tells her she has sauce on her nose and Emily is so humiliated, she runs off. They then spend half the book trying to find each other. This does go on a bit long. There’s a limit to how many times Emily and Adam can narrowly miss meeting one another. When Emily finally realises who he is and she decides to jump out of the window in order to avoid meeting him, things really have got a bit silly.

So it’s definitely not a book to take too seriously. It’s quite satisfactory the way all the coupling works out in the end but there’s nothing to tell you these are the ‘right’ characters, or that they’re going to live happily every after. And it’s not all that realistic. Emily might be nice-looking but she’s thirty-two. About ten years older than most successful glamour models. And I’m sure that if I created a website and put my bottom on it, I wouldn’t start earning lots of money from it, like Declan does when he puts Emily’s nether regions on the Net. I’m not even sure how he does manage to earn so much money from it. Is it pay-per-view? Perhaps, but once the national newspapers have got hold of it, and once Chris has forwarded it to his Facebook friends, there’s no need to look at the original.

And it’s also a bit disturbing that Adam takes on a job as a porn photographer in order to prove to Laura that he can look after their son Josh when she goes to Australia to find herself. Josh takes it all in his stride – he seems to know a lot more about glamour models than Adam does – but I’m not sure Laura would be too happy if she knew about it. So Adam’s pretty much deceiving her in order to get custody of Josh, and I don’t think that’s fair. But the rest of the book is so mad, it’s hard to get too uptight over these little problems. I couldn’t ever see Emily, Adam, Cara, Laura, Josh and Sebastian as real people (Chris I believe in apart from the bottom-kissing) so it doesn’t matter what Adam does really. I was amused enough to keep reading but I didn’t care about the characters.

The Perfect Lover (Penny Jordan)**

2010-03-07T01:21:00.003Z

In lots of ways, The Perfect Lover seemed more like part of a big blockbuster novel than a Mills & Boon. It was written as the fifth book in the Perfect Family series, which is about a big family that’s very rich and very close. Either the hero or the heroine of each book is part of the family – and in some cases, they both are. But of course, in a blockbuster novel, all the family members’ stories can happen at pretty much the same time. In a Mills & Boon series they have to take it in turn to fall in love.

A lot of The Perfect Lover is set in the past. In a previous book in the series, Louise was in love with her cousin Saul and wanted to spend some more time with him so she took Saul’s girlfriend Tullah into a maze (presumably a maze owned by the family) and left her there. It’s fair to say Saul didn’t exactly welcome her with open arms after that. In this book, we see how Saul’s rejection of Louise has affected her life. Her university work has gone downhill and her new tutor, Gareth Simmonds, is putting real pressure on her to direct her attention back to her work, which she doesn’t feel capable of doing.

We then have the parallel story of Louise in the present. She has graduated from university (albeit with a lower grade than expected), she has a good and very challenging job, and she’s a great deal more grown-up, with no romantic feelings for Saul whatsoever. Gareth reappears in her life when he gets a new job that is in some way connected to Louise’s job (I didn’t really take in all the details, it all sounded a bit boring) and they have no choice but to develop a working relationship.

If the story had been about Louise and Gareth rediscovering one another and falling in love, that would probably have made quite a good book. It would probably be quite a strange and interesting experience, meeting your old university tutor and discovering not only that he is human, he’s actually quite sexy as well. The fact that Gareth had once caught Louise crying drunkenly over Saul would only increase the embarrassment when they met again.

But Penny Jordan adds a twist to the story – one which for me spoils the book. Gareth and Louise don’t fall in love when they meet again – apparently they fell in love when they were tutor and student. And not only did they fall in love, they had sex.

Even if they’d admitted to each other that they liked each other, it would still have been a bit dodgy – I find it very unprofessional of Gareth to have sex with his student in any circumstances. But the fact Gareth didn’t know that she loved him makes it worse. As far as he was concerned, she was in love with Saul – and therefore on the rebound and in a bit of an emotional mess

Gareth and Louise don’t seem to love each other at all. They don’t even like each other. Gareth thinks Louise is a stupid, spoiled baby. Louise thinks Gareth is horrible and overbearing and interfering. And I agree with them – that’s exactly what I think of both of them. There’s no real sexual tension between them, or reluctant admiration, or a meeting of intellectual equals. It’s just Spoiled Brat meets Sex Mad Idiot. It doesn’t sound like a match made in heaven to me.

It’s true that Louise did, in a sense, invite Gareth to have sex with her. But it was hardly a romantic invitation. All she told him was that she just wanted to have sex – she didn’t care who it was with. Gareth than apparently “lost control” because he loved her.

Now, I have heard that men have less control than women. There is probably a point where they can’t help themselves. But there was never any need for Gareth to reach that point. He could, for example, have kept his clothes on. And his love for Louise really doesn’t seem like a good reason for taking advantage of her. Surely, if you love someone, the last thing you’d want to do is to take advantage of them when they’re vulnerable and force them into something you’ve got every reason to believe they don’t really want. Louise is unhappy and heartbroken – she’s in a situation where not many people would be able to think straight. She is a virgin at nineteen so she’s obviously waiting for someone special, and while Louise might think no-one will ever be as special as Saul, Gareth presumably knows there’s a good chance this won’t be the case.

I can quite see that Gareth might want to stop Louise from losing her virginity to the first random bloke who comes along but manhandling her onto the bed himself seems a bit off. Everyone quite rightly makes a big fuss when Louise takes Tullah into a maze and abandons her – it was a horrible thing to do. But I’d say Gareth’s behaviour is much worse. Tullah was probably frightened and upset but nothing was likely to happen to her. Louise isn’t going to get her virginity back. So why would Louise want anything to do with Gareth after that? Gareth didn’t rape her exactly but he did take advantage of her when she didn’t really know what she was doing

And wouldn’t he rather sleep with someone who actually wants him?

It would have been much more convincing if Gareth loved Louise enough to turn her down. The fact she propositioned him is still going to make her feel embarrassed enough to want to change courses. But this way, he hasn’t done anything wrong. Louise could still realise later on that she likes him. And the fact he was able to turn down sex that was offered on a plate is only likely to increase her respect for him. It must have been hard in more ways than one but Gareth could and should have said no.

Another problem with their relationship is, what does Gareth see in her? She might be pretty. She’s probably extremely intelligent. But as Gareth points out to her at every opportunity, she’s one of the most immature people in the world. (Trust me. It takes one to know one.) She might have the ability to pass a law degree, to argue her points convincingly, and to write a good essay about them. But that doesn’t mean she has the maturity to deal with adult relationships. You hear about child prodigies who go to university at ridiculously young ages and pass degrees but that doesn’t mean they’re capable of adult relationships. Louise probably should be capable of it – but because she’s had nineteen years’ experience of life rather than because she’s capable of passing a law degree. Gareth might admire her brilliant mind and she might have a nice body but emotionally she hasn’t grown up at all.

That’s not a criticism of Louise particularly. Everyone grows up at different rates (and Louise might well have had a very sheltered upbringing) and even if you’re not a bunny boiler, it probably is really hard when the guy you love marries someone else. But she is a baby, Gareth knows she’s a baby (he tells her so at every opportunity)… and yet he falls in love with her?

Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if that’s as far as it went. He can’t help who he falls in love with. But the fact she lacks the maturity to know what she wants just makes his decision to have sex with her even more disturbing and creepy.

Then they meet up again three years later and they argue and Louise tells herself and the readers that she hates Gareth. And the only reasons I have for doubting her are that she’s in a Mills & Boon, and Saul has already been married off. But then right near the end of the book, she decides she does love Gareth after all, and she always has, and she didn’t love Saul. The girl just can’t make up her mind! Then she tells Gareth she loves him and Gareth says he felt the same way about her all along and he wouldn’t have slept with her if he hadn’t loved her. Well, that’s one point in his favour, but he still shouldn’t have done it and the fact that he did do it shows that he can’t have cared about her all that much.

I would love to believe that Louise and Gareth are perfect for each other. They do, after all, have two of my favourite names ever. But there was nothing in the book to suggest they would make a good couple. Most of their time together has been spent arguing and shagging. We never (except in the throes of passion) see them enjoying each other’s company. When Louise is a student, there is no indication that they like one another. That part of the story is told from Louise’s point of view and she thinks of nothing but Saul. Gareth said he realised he loved her when she was arguing passionately about something during a tutorial. But we’ve seen Louise argue. She sounds like a spoiled brat. A child.

So it’s a bit of a mess. For both of them. And when Louise blames Gareth for the fact she changed her degree course and didn’t get a first, I can only sympathise with her. What else was she supposed to do? Carry on having private tutorials with him? Regardless of whether she loves him or not, he’s shown himself to be unprofessional and a bit of a sex maniac.

It should have been interesting to see them getting to know one another again. It’s not every day you meet your university tutor who had sex with you once after you told him you wanted a shag and you didn’t care who with. But you hardly see them together at all. They snap at one another a few times (they don’t see one another that often) and then they both get involved in a crisis where they don’t really have much option but to be polite to one another.

True, Gareth gets to see Louise doing her job well, and later he sees her behaving in a mature manner during the crisis, which involves her cousin Jack. Louise gets to see that Gareth is capable of behaving responsibly and kindly towards a distressed teenager without getting into bed with them. But this only takes a day or two. The next day, they’re engaged.

As far as I can see, the marriage is completely without foundation. Whether they did secretly love each other or not, Louise has changed a lot. She isn’t a brat anymore (although she does a good imitation of one on the few occasions she can’t avoid talking to Gareth). She’s grown-up, responsible, and actually pretty boring. Gareth doesn’t know the new Louise well enough to know if he loves her or not. And Louise might go off him completely once she’s actually got him. Maybe she only loves the guys she can’t have. They don’t have enough time either to fall in love if they weren’t in love before, or to work out whether they still love each other.

It’s such a shame. Penny Jordan is a good writer and she has created some strong characters who would be really interesting if they weren’t the hero and heroine of a Mills & Boon and therefore expected to live happily ever after. In a big blockbuster novel it would probably make a great storyline as their relationship is so complicated and has various angles which can’t really be examined in a feel-good romance. They could take months, even years to get to know one another again. And if their marriage didn’t last a week – which I don’t think it would – it really wouldn’t matter.

Appointment at the Altar (Jessica Hart)***

2010-02-11T00:31:00.003Z

Lucy – like author Jessica Hart, in fact – suffers from itchy feet, and the only jobs she has ever had are short-term ones. Whilst working as a cook on an Australian ranch, she meets Guy, who is the big boss of a merchant bank. He challenges her to get a ‘proper’ job – and Lucy duly does… in his merchant bank.

There are a few problems with the plot. Firstly, Lucy’s job situation does not seem like a sign of her immaturity to me. On the contrary, I would say that to travel to far-flung places, taking on a wide variety of jobs along the way and forming social relationships with all different kinds of people along the way, does demand a great deal of maturity. I’m not exactly the most mature person in the world and I’m not sure I could manage a job in a merchant bank but I’d be much better in steady employment in the same place at the same time with the same people than I would travelling all over the world and trying to make friends with new people all the time. Lucy might have certain childish characteristics, which will be discussed later, but she works hard on and does well at all her different jobs and I wouldn’t say her lack of maturity was reflected in her work.

This is not the only weakness in the plot. Hart has to manoeuvre things so Lucy and Guy are in London together. Guy needs to go back to London so Lucy can see him at work – which of course means Lucy can’t stay in Australia. So Hart sends Lucy back home to try and talk her ex-boyfriend Richard out of a coma. Lucy’s sister Meredith, who happens to be in love with Richard, takes over Lucy’s job. The first problem for me is that Lucy doesn’t love Richard, yet leaving her job and travelling halfway round the world for him rather suggests she does. And I’d have thought her boss would have understood her need to go to him even if they’re no more than good friends, so I don’t think he’d insist on Meredith staying to take her place. And it doesn’t seem quite fair on Meredith to be thousands of miles away from the guy she loves just because he’s in love with Lucy. I think these problems could all have been sorted out. Why couldn’t it have been Lucy’s best female friend in a coma? That’s a good but non-romantic reason for her to go back. Then if Hart wanted an ex-boyfriend around the place, Lucy’s friend could always have a non-comatose brother.

True, Richard does create the rather interesting situation whereby Lucy, in order to stop Richard’s parents from getting their hopes up, tells them she already has a boyfriend called Guy – even though she doesn’t like the real Guy at all. For the most part, it is a wonderfully farcical situation. But if you stop and think about it, it seems a bit wrong and disrespectful to tell such elaborate lies to Richard’s parents. They do have a lot on their minds but I’m sure they’re big enough to handle the fact that Lucy could be single and not in love with Richard.

But actually, these problems hardly interfere with the book at all, which is far more about Lucy’s attempts to convince Guy she can be grown up and responsible – whilst trying to convince herself that she really doesn’t fancy Guy. But then again, if your friend is in a coma, would a challenge from the annoying guy who works at the merchant bank really be that important?

I don’t want to be too mean about the book though because I really did love it. Hart’s writing is extremely funny, and her hero and heroine are a delightful couple. Lucy isn’t very good at thinking before she speaks and she really enjoys baiting Guy. This is immature behaviour in some ways but as I said, it doesn’t have a negative effect on her work, and the sparkiness and spontaneity that prompts it are things I hope she never grows out of. She does get into scrapes quite a lot and in some ways she is a little bit dim but at the same time she is very intelligent, determined, committed to whatever she’s doing, and able to make people adore her without trying.

‘Adorable’ people in books can sometimes be a problem because not every reader is going to see the character in the same way as the author. But I really liked Lucy a lot. Guy sees her as someone who is happy all the time, which is the sort of person that usually really annoys me, but Lucy doesn’t seem like one of those annoying relentlessly happy people to me. She’s someone who feels very deeply whatever the emotion happens to be. She feels anger, love and sadness just as strongly as she feels happiness. I do wish she’d been just a little bit sadder about her friend in a coma. But then again, why feel sad about someone who is really just a plot device? The romance is the important thing, and Lucy and Guy’s story is beautifully told.

Guy is lovely too. He can seem a bit sarcastic and superior at times, and that’s why Lucy understandably takes against him at first. But after a while you realise that although he teases Lucy, he doesn’t look down on her and he genuinely enjoys spending time with her. He is very caring, kind and supportive to everyone but it just so happens he has a great sense of humour too and enjoys Lucy’s verbal sparring and general unpredictably. He’s an example of a guy who isn’t a total pathetic wimp but who does have vulnerabilities. He doesn’t shows them in an obvious way but anyone who cares as deeply as Guy does – about his family, his friends, his colleagues and Lucy - is always going to be vulnerable. And that’s enough to make me like him. He doesn’t need to have bad things happening to him – he just needs to show he’s human, that he is capable of feeling hurt and that at least sometimes, Lucy will look after him. That’s how a relationship should work. Well, that’s how mine works.

The Rebel Prince (Faye Morgan)**

2010-02-01T02:08:00.004Z

The last romance I reviewed was about a princess who falls in love with a non-royal man. The Rebel Prince tells the more traditional story of the non-royal girl who meets a handsome prince. I tend not to enjoy stories about princes unless they’re the wimpy pathetic type. Yes, okay, finding a man with wimpy pathetic qualities in a Mils & Boon is very rare. But the more princely they are, as a rule, the more likely they are to be totally up themselves and physically incapable of showing any weaknesses or vulnerabilities. Which I consider a bit of a turn-off.

There are certainly no weaknesses in the character of Prince Sebastian, who is soon to be crowned King. Even though he has no wish to be a King there is something very strong and capable about him. But I liked him. Why did I like him? Because he’s a really nice guy. I wouldn’t go out with him myself but he is extremely nice and thoughtful and he knows how to have a good time. He treats everyone he meets with kindness and respect. I’m not saying that this is unusual for a Prince – I wouldn’t know – but it is quite unusual for a Mills & Boon hero.

You have to admire Sebastian even more for his patience towards the heroine of the book, Emma. Emma is a bit of an oddball. I usually wouldn’t refer to someone else as an oddball except as a joke because that would be a bit hypocritical but Emma is much worse than me. I’m sure she is. (Well, I hope she is.) The blurb describes her as ‘shy’. While this could refer to her complete lack of sexual experience, she is certainly not shy in other ways. On the contrary, she is extremely outspoken, even rude, and she is not afraid to walk up to a table of distinguished, titled guests and introduce herself as the chef. I applaud the fact that she is not overwhelmed by Sebastian’s social status - but a small amount of deference and respect for someone who is, after all, another human being, shouldn’t be too much like hard work.

Emma’s first appearance is, frankly, bewildering. Yes, being knocked out with a water polo ball probably can send you a bit peculiar. But Emma was talking such rubbish, it became quite disturbing. It was like she was on drugs or something. In another type of book, she might have got away with it, but this is a Mills & Boon. For the most part, she does seem like quite a nice person though, and she certainly doesn’t deserve the cruel treatment by her fellow cooks, even if she does treat them as rudely as she treats Sebastian. Even if they didn’t like her, they could have shown some respect for their national fish.

But there is a lot to enjoy in this book. The idea of the prince falling in love with the cook is always very sweet. There are also some interesting minor characters, including Will the doctor, Sebastian’s Aunt Trudy, and Emma’s cousin Louise. They all have their own interesting sub-plot, and whilst not all are resolved completely, this book is part of a mini-series. Aunt Trudy is probably too old to have a book of her own (although who knows, I have read a Mills & Boon about a fifty-two year old grandmother) but despite my reservations about Emma, I would definitely be interested in reading more about Louise and Will (not that I think they’ll end up with each other...).

Plane -Jane Princess (Karen Templeton)***

2010-01-18T21:27:00.004Z

This book tells the story of a princess who meets her handsome normal man. I sometimes find Silhouettes a bit dull but this one had me gripped. And most of the time it had me laughing too.

Princess Sophie is a lovely character and she’s very funny – which happens all too rarely in romantic novels. I think she’s the most childish twenty-nine year old I’ve ever heard of (which is saying something) but she is sweet and caring. The blurb says she has the ‘opportunity’ of spending two weeks as a normal person which does kind of suggest the opportunity is offered to her by someone but this isn’t really what happens. Sophie becomes a normal person by disguising herself as a blonde bimbo called Lisa and sneaking out under her bodyguard’s nose. It’s not very realistic but it’s so hilarious I really don’t care. And Sophie’s country, Carpathia, does seem a very old-fashioned sort of place. Maybe it just doesn’t occur to her bodyguard that Sophie might want to run away, or that she’d be able to disguise herself to the extent she does.

The hero, Steve Kolaski, is a lovely, kind man. He’s not my type but that doesn’t matter. More to the point, I’m not sure he’s Sophie’s type either. He’s so paternal towards her it’s quite disturbing that he fancies her. But he is lovely and it’s good to see the friendship between them developing and when they finally get together it is a lovely moment because you know how much Sophie likes him. At least they clearly like and respect each other a lot and they already know they’re capable of living together, at least as boss and babysitter.

The story of how Sophie becomes part of his family is a fascinating one. Well, in some ways it’s the traditional ‘the hero needs a babysitter and the heroine happens to be available’. But making her a princess gives the story an interesting twist. Sophie is neither a brilliant housewife nor someone who is used to looking after children. Because she’s used to having servants, there would be no need for her to learn to cook or clean and although she does read stories to the poor children in the principality, she has never been allowed to take any real responsibility for them. So although she does go through the usual clichéd cooking disasters and losing-a-child disasters, it is more understandable from someone with her background.

Sophie has always worked very hard on her princessly duties and now she works hard at cooking, cleaning and babysitting. She is ignorant, but she’s not stupid – she has no trouble learning to cook when someone actually takes the trouble of showing her round the kitchen. And it is funny watching Steve trying to figure out what’s so odd about her. He knows there must be a reason why this intelligent and hard-working woman is making such elementary mistakes but he can’t quite put his finger on it.

But the wonderful humour can sometimes be a disadvantage because you can get so caught up in that, you forget things. Like I kept forgetting Steve had five children because the twelve year old female twins are barely in the book. Courtney came into it briefly when she started her period but it was almost as though the incident had been brought in to show Steve how important ‘Lisa’ is. I don’t really mind but I do kind of feel Templeton missed some opportunities, like Courtney’s twin sister Bree could have been jealous that Courtney had started her period before she did. That would have been a very interesting psychological challenge for Sophie to deal with and not an unrealistic one – and it would also have given her the chance to show how grown-up she can be.

It also bothers me the way Steve tells Sophie she isn’t beautiful but she is attractive. I think if you love someone they must be beautiful to you. When I first saw my boyfriend I wasn’t that impressed really. Now I think he’s the most gorgeous man in the universe and if anyone says he isn’t handsome I think they’re mad. So why shouldn’t Steve think Sophie is beautiful? He doesn’t have to tell her if she doesn’t like it but telling her she’s not beautiful isn’t very nice.

There is one moment when Steve’s mother calls Sophie by her real name. All writers and editors will make mistakes sometimes and it must be confusing, having a heroine with two names. But it came at a point in the book where I really had no idea if this meant Steve’s mother knew who she was or whether it was a printing error. Steve’s sister knew who she was, so she could have told her mother – plus Sophie was in a daydream at the time and quite possibly wasn’t answering to ‘Lisa’. After a few pages I realised it was definitely a printing error.

But although there was a lot about the book that bothered me I did enjoy reading it. The princess sections were convincing without being over-glamorous and to my surprise I liked the children too. I don’t like reading about cute kids as a rule, they can be cringeworthy but the children in this book were (with the exception of the twins) well-rounded and interesting characters, each with their own problems. Just like the adults.

The Boss's Unconventional Assistant (Jennie Adams)****

2010-01-13T20:25:00.006Z

I have read the odd Mills & Boon and found it amusing but up until I read this book the funniest bits were the sentences that didn’t quite make sense, like ‘putting her shoes on, she ran after him’. I loved the image of the heroine kind of hopping and hanging onto the banister as she literally tried to run and put her shoes on at the same time. Yes, I do know the authors didn’t mean for me to imagine this but that is what they’re saying.

Then there are some other sentences that sound very grand and sensual on first reading but when you think about them, they’re actually a bit mad. The one my mum (who has only read about one Mills & Boon) likes to quote is: ‘Standing in front of her, he was unmistakeably male’. Well considering the guy was naked at the time I would hope it was unmistakeable! What’s the alternative? ‘Standing in front of her, it was difficult to tell whether he was male or not’????? If that’s the case, the heroine’s got a problem!

Then I read The Boss’s Unconventional Assistant and I found out that Mills & Boons could not only be intentionally funny, they could actually be rather hilarious. Soph might be my favourite Mills & Boon character ever and not just because she shares my name. It actually took me a while to get used to the fact Jennie Adams calls her Soph – that is really the only criticism I can make. My friends call me Soph all the time and they might even talk about me as Soph but I would never introduce myself by that name. Some names like Jo and Sue are short forms but I can accept them as proper names. Soph however is more of a nickname.

In fact she herself introduces herself as Sophia first and then asks people to call her Soph. She says that everyone calls her Soph but that’s not always true – when Soph goes to visit her sisters, they call her Sophia. I didn’t keep a tally, but I’m sure they called her Sophia more often than they called her Soph. And I was a bit surprised to read that she went a bit mushy inside when the hero, Grey, called her Soph for the first time. That sounds more like friendliness than romance to me – a change from Sophia to Sophie would have seemed more convincing. And yes, my boyfriend does call me Soph. But not usually when he’s being romantic. It’s always Sophie or cariad. If he says ‘I love you Soph’ it usually means I’ve done something a bit silly like getting canopy and canapé mixed up. Or boudoir and abattoir.

And while we’re on the subject of names, isn’t Grey a short form of Graham? Maybe it is his actual name and Adams has given him an unusual name to make him seem sexy but for a boss to ask his assistant to call him Grey and for him to insist on calling her Sophia seems a bit odd.

But never mind, Soph does suit her. She’s not only an unconventional assistant, she’s an unconventional Mills & Boon heroine too. Most of them are fairly quiet an unassuming and make no attempt to wear the trousers. You do get the odd one who answers back but that’s usually part of the sexual undercurrents. It’s not unknown for the heroine to be taking care of the hero when he’s injured – that happened in the last Mills & Boon I read, The Italian Playboy’s Secret Son - but the hero is always pretty much in charge even when she’s pushing him along in a wheelchair (Grey isn’t in a wheelchair but Cesar in The Italian Playboy’s Secret Son is). Most heroines have a nurturing side to their personality but they tend not to do it with aromatherapy candles and massage oils. And they definitely don’t have crimson or green hair. Crimson lips and green eyes, possibly. But not hair.

I absolutely loved Soph. She is bubbly and fun and capable of getting into awkward situations but not because she’s lacking in intelligence. The first time we see her she is wondering how to smuggle a rabbit into Grey’s house without him knowing. I’m not even sure if I’ve read about a heroine who has a pet before, certainly not one whom she rescues one on the way to her new job and decides to take with her.

She’s cheerful and determined but she comes over as sweet rather than overbearing. She can be bossy, she has no trouble making sure Grey does his physiotherapy but there’s something so charming about it and it isn’t because she wants to overpower him. It’s not even because her job is to look after Grey while he recovers from a broken arm and sprained ankle. She’s just genuinely worried about him. And not just because she fancies the pants off him. She’s practical and self-sufficient – even when she does fail to understand how to set up a visual link on the computer, she knows exactly who to phone and has it sorted by the time Grey has come back into the room. But she’s also very vulnerable, even before she starts falling in love with Grey.

Grey isn’t so vivid a character but who could be? He starts off quite growly and grumpy – he’s been told to take some time off work but he really doesn’t want to do that. Soph isn’t the type to get in an argument but she certainly doesn’t agree with his decision and she’s not afraid to let him know that. But then you gradually see him realising that there’s more to life than work. At first it’s just little signs, small reactions to Soph, and slowly you realise that he’s actually a really nice guy – probably as close to being worthy of Soph as anyone can get. And you really want it to work out for them. (Yes, I know, it’s Mills & Boon, of course it’s going to work out for them. But there’s nothing wrong with hoping.)

Jennie Adams’ writing has all the requisite (but not always present) romance but it is also full of humour. The part where Grey discovers the presence of Alfie (Soph’s rabbit) is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read – and I’ve read a lot of books. The scenes that take place in Grey’s office are also nicely done. Adams doesn’t get boringly technical about his work and if she does describe something there is a point to it – either it’s an opportunity for humour or something that shows you how Soph and Grey’s relationship is developing. It’s still Mills & Boon in that Adams follows the conventional structure but it’s full of originality.

The Italian Playboy's Secret Son (Rebecca Winters)***

2010-01-11T17:10:00.011Z

I would love to write for Mills & Boon. Not that I’m saying I’m an incurable romantic but it is good to know in advance if things are going to end happily. So many books, including a lot of romance books, might end happily but they don’t always end with happily ever after. And then there are loads of books that don’t end up happily at all. I prefer books with happy endings and with Mills & Boon that’s exactly what you’re going to get.

There are however a few problems with them and the first one is evident on the front page. I don’t mean to be rude but this book has an awful title. All recent Mills & Boons have titles like this. It’s like they have a special formula or something.

The titles start with the definite article. The next word refers to the hero of the story. It could be preceded by some adjective, possibly referring to either his nationality or his financial status or it might go straight on to the noun, which tells you his status in the heroine’s life at the beginning of the book. So in the case of this book, the heroine clearly sees the hero as a playboy rather than as a future husband. The other book I bought at the same time as this one is called The Boss’s Unconventional Assistant. Can you see the pattern?

Next, just to show the strength and possessiveness of the hero, the genitive case is used. In The Boss’s Conventional Assistant, it shows the hero’s possession of the heroine, who happens to work as his assistant. In The Italian Playboy’s Secret Son, it refers to another person he possesses. If a person is referred to in the title, it can probably only be either his future spouse or a child, as anyone else is going to get in the way of the relationship. But it might instead refer to some sort of act made by the hero, perhaps a promise or a revenge. The object of the sentence will also be preceded by an adjective, such as Secret or Unconventional in the examples quoted here.

So, if you write a book about a nice rich Welsh guy who promises to take care of some girl but has no intention of falling in love with her (although this being Mills & Boon he naturally does) you might want to call it something like The Welsh Millionaire’s Deathbed Promise. I would actually like to write a book about a Welsh millionaire but it won’t have any deathbeds in so I’ll have to call it something different. But just from looking at this imaginary title you can tell a lot about what the hero of that completely imaginary book might be like. You know where he was born. You know he’s got loads of money. You know he’s lost someone close to him. You know he believes in honouring his promises.

Similarly, you know quite a lot about the contents of The Italian Playboy’s Secret Son even before you have looked at the first page. He’s Italian. He has a son he doesn’t know about. The secret son will have some connection to the heroine of his book – it could be that the child’s mother is the heroine’s sister or best friend and that the heroine is now caring for him. But more likely the hero and heroine have met before and the child was the result. You can also guess why the heroine didn’t tell the hero about his son – the hero is a playboy. So the heroine almost certainly kept the child secret because he probably had loads of girlfriends and no interest in settling down..

And that is the main thrust of the whole book. The secret son in question is indeed the product of a past liaison and heroine Sarah didn’t tell Formula One driver Cesar about him because she didn’t think he would be interested and couldn’t bear to go to him and be rejected. Some might say – as Cesar does, several times – that he had the right to know and she should have told him. Yes, she probably should have done. But Sarah is so loving and caring, both towards her son Johnny and to Cesar, it is impossible to view her as harshly as Cesar does. You know she loves Cesar. You know she’s still unhappy about losing him, even though she lost him due to her own actions. You really want Cesar to forgive her and for them both to live happily ever after.

Cesar is lovely too. Although he is cruel to Sarah, you can understand why. You can see how badly she hurt him and also how much he loves his son. The way Cesar and Johnny instantly adored one another is not entirely realistic – but this is a Mills & Boon. You can see Cesar’s point of view as well. His situation is compounded by the fact he had an accident on the race track and is paralysed from the waist down. It’s an interesting situation for a Mills & Boon hero to be in. He couldn’t throw Sarah on the bed and ravish her even if he wanted to – and you can tell he does. It’s an extra barrier between them and it serves to make Sarah’s love for him all the more believable and Cesar’s anger towards her that bit more reasonable. The poor man must be so unhappy and frustrated and not just in that way.

The beginning of the book seems rather rushed. The first meeting between Cesar and Johnny – and the first between Cesar and Sarah for many years – takes place in the hospital where Cesar is showing no interest in recovering from his injuries. There is clearly a lot of emotion on both sides and at the time I was disappointed with how fast Winters zipped through this part of the story. It is true that it takes place over a fairly short space of time but a great deal happens and I would have liked to see it in more detail. The rest of the book, which shows Sarah struggling to adapt with her son’s new relationship with Cesar, is also very interesting but there is quite a lot that happens that doesn’t need to happen and I personally would have preferred to see more of what happened in the hospital.

But I did enjoy it and I thought it was well put-together. For once, the hero’s sudden decision to marry the heroine, despite the fact he really doesn’t want to be in the same house as her, much less the same bed, is surprisingly convincing, as is Sarah’s decision not to tell him to fuck off. Cesar is overbearing at times but he also had a very warm, gentle and loving side. And all the way through the book, I felt they were made for each other. So many Mills & Boon relationships seem to be very much based on the physical side. The hero’s actions towards the heroine can seem unforgiveable it’s very difficult to believe they will last long together and it’s only too easy to question her decision to forgive him. Sarah and Cesar aren’t like that. They struggle to get on and each hurts the other but their compatibility and their feelings for each other are never in doubt.

Bad Behaviour (Sheila Flanagan)***

2009-12-30T17:38:00.004Z

Bad Behaviour was difficult to read at first. Sheila O’Flanagan’s style of writing seemed clunky and her characters were horrible. But I stuck with it and I’m glad I did because despite a disappointing beginning, I ended up really liking it.

The clunkiness stopped bothering me after about five chapters and there were nearly forty chapters altogether. And O’Flanagan’s style probably isn’t that clunky really. All authors will have their own personal style, and when you come upon a writer with a new style or at least a style that’s different from the last few books you read, it can take you a while to get used to it. You could argue that I wasn’t so much getting used to the style as getting anaesthetised to it but anaesthetic really isn’t such a bad thing. My boyfriend had an anaesthetic when he had his operation and he actually ended up having quite a nice time during the operation and now he’s all better and much happier (and much better at football though he was brilliant to start with) and he probably wouldn’t be quite as happy if he had a memory of complete and total agony during the operation. So once I was anesthetised to the style I enjoyed reading the book and after a while the style just didn’t hurt me anymore. I actually liked it and a bit of clunkiness can actually add to the comedy scenes.

There was still a problem with the characters though. Most of them just weren’t very nice people, and that too can make a book difficult to read. Darcey, the heroine, comes across as completely cold and unfriendly. As you read the book, you learn that she isn’t like that really, and if she is occasionally a little bit reserved, you can kind of see why. For about the first third of the book, I really disliked Darcey. It’s great she’s so good at her job but she didn’t seem to care about people as human beings at all. Maybe it would have been better if O’Flanagan had made it clear earlier how nice Darcey really was. The book was mostly from her point of view. It’s possible to show a character behaving in a cold and unfriendly manner, whilst at the same time making it clear that she’s lovely and caring underneath it all. This was something that came across very strongly later on but I wish it had happened sooner.

Also, Darcey did come over as a bit of a slut. She travels to different countries as part of her job and she seems to have a shag buddy in every country. Darcey would prefer me to describe it as ‘sex with no strings attached’ but isn’t that exactly what a shag buddy is? I don’t think there’s anything wrong as such with wanting sex but not wanting a relationship – considering Darcey’s relationship experience, you can’t really blame her. But the problem I have it is that it does cast doubt on her ability to do her job. We’re supposed to believe she’s brilliant at her job, travelling to strange places and getting people to sign contracts. But when we find out she’s actually got a bloke in every country, you have to wonder, did she really get those contracts through her brilliant people skills, or was it more because of who she’s shagging?

There are also sections of the book which are from the point of view of her former best friend Nieve, who stole Darcey’s boyfriend Aidan the night he was going to propose to her. Nieve is just a totally self-centred cow who believes money is the root of all happiness. It’s just very difficult to like her at all. Maybe around the middle of the book you might develop some sympathy for her for being so clueless about what life should really be like, and definitely at the end it was impossible not to feel for her. But it’s a bit late by then. And it really annoyed me that the character of Mary, who wasn’t a big character at all but who did take care of Nieve when she needed someone, totally disappeared as soon as she’d played her role in the plot. If they’d at least stayed in contact, it would have helped me to think more positively of Nieve.

Aidan, like all fictional Aidans, is the unreliable type, but unlike the other Aidans I’ve read about he doesn’t have a very good reason for his behaviour towards Darcey. He didn’t seem that bad a person, he’s quite weak and useless and I usually really go for that a man. But things were never really quite resolved for him. There’s another main character called Neil who comes to work with Darcey, and she spends most of the book wondering whether she likes either of them, and if so, how much and in what way. Neil does at least seem a lot more reliable than Aidan, but likeable? He seems a bit boring to me but in some ways he was probably the most convincing character in the book. I’m sure there are loads of people around like Neil.

Darcey’s friend Anna was maybe the worst of the main characters. She’s very nice but she seemed to snap back and forth quite unconvincingly between being Darcey’s friend and Darcey’s HR manager. I’m sure in the job world that sort of relationship can be quite complicated, and it might have made an interesting story/subplot if O’Flanagan had tried to develop it. But she didn’t. And I have to say, I was actually on Darcey’s side when Darcey told her a secret about her past. Anna was hurt that Darcey hadn’t told her before. But why should she? Why should she tell her friend about everything that’s ever happened to her? Anna really seemed more like a plot device than a character most of the time but she did seem like a very likeable plot device.

The plot took a while to get going, but once it had, it was very satisfying and involving with all sorts of strange twists and turns. Parts of it were very exciting, and until very near the end, I not only had no idea how things were going to end up for Darcey and Nieve and the others, I wasn’t even sure how I wanted things to end up. Usually, when I read a book, I know pretty early on who I want the heroine to end up with (if anyone). But in this book, I just wasn’t sure. However, by the end, I was completely happy with how things turned out. I thought it was amazing the way O’Flanagan could have written so much about her characters, yet have given so little away. And it was all so compelling, wondering what was going to happen, and so convincing when it finally did. If O’Flanagan had cut the first few chapters, maybe I’d have given the book four stars. It’s all so cleverly done.

O’Flanagan chose to give quite a lot of detail about the work Darcey and Nieve do, which might have been interesting for some people, but I found it rather boring and I had trouble following it. I’m not an office person, I never will be an office person even if I do end up working in an office, and it just seemed like a totally alien world and a terminally dull one. I didn’t really care about Darcey’s and Nieve’s jobs. I was happy for them that they were doing something they loved but I don’t really care about what people are, I’m more interested in who they are. There’s a whole lot more to people than what they’re prepared to do for money. Well, unless you’re Nieve, that is.

We Need to Talk about Kevin Keegan (Giles Smith)****

2009-12-23T21:45:00.003Z

(yes okay, my football references are slightly out of date, I did write this review months ago)

Giles Smith is a journalist who seems to have had a regular football column somewhere or other. In this book, he collected some of his best work from 2005-2007 and put them all together. None of the articles are particularly serious in style – even when Smith starts talking about something serious he soon meanders off-topic (like I do sometimes, only funnier) and starts examining the strangest situations, whatever pops into his head. The articles are all very funny but many of then do have an underlying seriousness. While Smith’s Guide to Tapping Up is a hilarious read, at the same time it does make you think about how serious a problem it is. I wonder if Smith, as a Chelsea fan, can still see the funny side.

Even if he can’t, at least Manchester City are still ripe for the (piss)-taking. Joleon Lescott, formerly of Everton, seemed more than happy with his current side until Moneybags Man Shitty took an interest. Suddenly Lescott was doing all he could to make sure Everton wanted to get rid of him - although he stopped short of taking the Darren Bent route of advertising his availability on Twitter.

Perhaps Smith could even make the Emmanuel Adebayor-goal celebration situation amusing. I admit, when he scored that goal, I wished he was still with Arsenal. Seconds later, when he arrived at the other end of the pitch having raced at a speed never before seen from him on a football pitch, I was so glad that the unsporting twat was nothing to do with my team anymore. Man Shitty – you’re welcome to him. And if you want to see him run even faster than that, get one of the other clubs to offer him higher wages than you’re giving him. Then watch him go.

On second thoughts, I’m not sure that even Giles Smith could make that sound funny.

Smith’s articles also include imaginary football-related documents such as what the Uefa Pro Licence course might consist of, an overview of the different seating arrangements that might exist at the new Wembley Stadium, and a list of hobbies footballers could take up if disaster struck and a power cut meant and they couldn’t use their games consoles anymore.

There is an equally imaginary letter from the FA to a rather depleted England squad, with details of the itinerary for their summer tour of the USA. We read the diary of Fabio Capello after he becomes England manager and the inner thoughts of currently injured Aston Villa winger Stewart Downing on being the only member of the England squad without a Wag (he makes up for it later by finding a double-barrelled one). There are also many discussions, written with great seriousness, of unlikely but intriguing situations such as what would happen if Alex Ferguson and Harry Redknapp had a fight. (As long as they didn’t make it a topless fight I’d be happy with either outcome.)

Reality TV also gets a regular mention – although any footballer who appears on I’m a Celebrity, Strictly Come Dancing or Dancing on Ice is just asking to be ridiculed. As for those who are desperate enough to appear on more than one of them… well, they make the Wags on Wags’ Boutique look camera shy. I would love to go on Wags’ Boutique. I wouldn’t recognise a hair extension if it slapped me round the face (my hair doesn’t need extending, it gets long all by itself) but I would have been a great help when they were wondering what the third letter of ‘silhouette’ was. And while my “What does ‘high street’ mean?” might have filled my fellow Wags with despair, at least I know how many players there are in a football team.

I wasn’t so keen on Craig Bellamy’s Guide to Hitting People with Golf Clubs (why mention his one non-redeeming feature and ignore all the good stuff, like… anyway, moving on) and there was rather too much about England and not enough about Wales, and Smith really doesn’t know a thing about opera.

In one article, he claims that the cheapest seats at the opera are £75. As someone who has never paid more than £30 for a ticket(and rarely pays more than £10) I have to wonder which opera houses he’s been going to. At many venues, even the maximum price is under £75. Could you see a Premiership football match for £10 a time? Even at Hull City it’s £15.

In some ways it was probably more fun to read the articles in their original format, rationing yourself to one a week or however often Smith published them, but even in the age of the Internet, it might be time-consuming – and expensive – to find all the archived versions. So it’s great to have such easy access to so many of them in this volume. It is not a good book to read in one sitting - in order to enjoy each article properly, you don’t want to read too many at a time. So maybe it’s not one to take to the beach but I found it ideal for reading in the bath.

A Wag's Tale: The Beautiful Game (Claire Challis and Fabulous)****

2009-12-17T01:21:00.004Z

Ex-Wag Fabulous joins with writer Claire Challis to tell you what being a Wag is really like. Fabulous of course is a pseudonym (and for all I know Claire Challis is too) but the book doesn’t tell you who Fabulous is and unfortunately I can’t guess. I don’t think it’s even made clear that Fabulous is female. It’s certainly an adjective more often applied to themselves by men …

The Beautiful Game is inspired by real life, but the characters in it are fictional. So I can only assume the resemblance between protagonist Louise and Coleen Rooney; chief Wag Tara and Victoria Beckham, and glamour girl Pattii and Abi Clancy are purely coincidental. I’ve spoken to Abi and I think she’s at least a million times nicer than Pattii but Pattii is kind of like how I expected Abi would be like. I have no idea who the fourth Wag, former actress Jodie is. Possibly she’s Cheryl Cole, but Jodie wasn’t a singer and Gary is far too nice to be Cheryl’s husband (I won’t dignify him with a name but he knows who he is).

The title is quite clever – as well as being literally both a tale about a Wag and a tale that was partly written by a Wag, a wagtail is also a type of bird – and so is a Wag. The ‘Beautiful Game’ part is good too – not only is this one of the clichéd terms for football, it’s also about Wags playing their own game: the game of being beautiful. It’s a very clever title (so it was probably Claire Challis, not Fabulous, who thought of it).

The Beautiful Game is full of action all the way through with a few dull clothes bits. You see the girls going shopping, getting discounts and free clothes (completely ridiculous, I’d never let a shop give me free clothes especially not if I was filthy rich). You see them having to dress their best every time they leave the house (fuck that, why should I bother, it’s not even as though they don’t want to see me looking a mess). Then they wear high heels for football matches and I’ve said in another post what I think of that. The other side of things involves them getting photographed wherever they go and suffering the indignity of their husbands and boyfriends going out and getting drunk and being caught with other women… okay maybe Jodie is Cheryl Cole.

But whilst there was never a dull moment, everything went by a bit too quickly. All too often, Louise found herself in a horrible situation, not knowing what she’s going to do – which is something we really like to see in chick lit heroines – only for us to find in the next chapter that three months had passed and all we know is that ‘everything sorted itself out eventually’. Maybe this is a realistic interpretation of Wag life, if not any life – a lot of the time, when something horrible has happened and your boyfriend is no longer speaking to you (I can’t say I’ve ever had this problem, with me it’s the problem was when they were all trying to talk to me at the same time) the truth is, nothing else does happen except that you keep on trying to talk to each other, a little bit more each time, and eventually things do change from stony silence to being back to normal.

That’s the realistic way of doing it but it doesn’t work so well in fiction. I like my drama drawn out as long as possible (and actually now I think about it that does also apply to real life). If Challis and Fabulous had tried drawing out some of the drama, they could have ended up with several novels, one for each plotline. The first book would have been about Louise first becoming a Wag. It does start off very nicely, with Louise feeling very lost and unsure and alone, and having lots of trouble because people don’t believe she’s Adam Jones’ Wag. But by the next chapter, she seems completely comfortable with it. Maybe Wagicity is something you do adapt to quickly, but there is so much potential in the idea of a new Wag struggling to fit in with her new lifestyle.

Later on, there are issues with Adam going out with the lads and getting drunk. That could take up a whole book. Jodie’s fiancé Gary (as we find out on Page 1 for some reason, even though this doesn’t happen until near the end of the book) is arrested on the News hours before their wedding. It probably should have taken a whole novel for Jodie to agree to take him back. I won’t spoil the book by mentioning all the little storylines, but Challis and Fabulous could have made a whole series, and I am quite disappointed they didn’t. The dialogue is convincing with just enough conventional Wag/footballer talk to make you laugh without stopping you from taking the situation seriously. The characters too are as Waggish as could be, but apart from Pattii they are all clearly very nice people. And although everything that was in the book was very exciting and enthralling. I just wanted more detail.

And another thing. This actually annoyed me quite a lot. At the beginning of the book, Adam and Louise move from Cardiff to Leeds. They met at school. Louise’s family lives in Cardiff. So as far as I can see, Adam and Louise are Welsh. I can see why Louise might have wanted to move to Cardiff to be with Adam, but not why her parents would go too. Also, Adam is even called Adam Jones, and you don’t get more Welsh than that (except maybe if he was called Rhys Jones). Not that there are any players called Jones who play for Wales at the moment but… never mind. My point is, it sounds like they’re Welsh. Doesn’t it?

But then I started wondering: how come Adam isn’t a Welsh international? He’s good enough to join a Premiership side, so he must have been considered. At the very least, he must have played for the Under-21s (Louise is twenty, so I’m assuming Adam is about the same - about half the current Wales squad are twenty or under). There are some really crap players who get to play for the Under-21s like Wrexham players, so Adam ought to have played for them too. Then Adam got picked for England and I was so annoyed. Maybe he was born in England and then he moved to Wales, and he made the decision himself that he would rather represent England, which isn’t unreasonable I suppose. But this isn’t made clear and I was really really disappointed. And he was much sexier when I imagined him having a Welsh accent.

My Booky Wook (Russell Brand)****

2009-12-10T17:56:00.002Z

Probably no book has given me quite so many mixed feelings as My Booky Wook. To his credit, Russell Brand did just about manage to succeed in making me like him as a person. He does have the ability to be extremely funny, and it’s very difficult not to admire his honesty. His fun-loving attitude is also likeable in general, although it undeniably needs a lot of restraining, and I like people with a bit of originality who don’t spend all their time pretending to be the non-existent normal person.

But then there are the problems. Some of the things he’s done, as a child and as an adult, really are despicable. Some are rather charming, in an insane sort of way. Recent events concerning Andrew Sachs suggest Brand is actually just a bit of a wanker. But that doesn’t mean My Booky Wook isn’t an extremely good read.

Unlike a lot of published writers, celebrity or otherwise, Russell Brand can actually write. He writes very well (his opening sentence would have been excellent in a work of fiction; in an autobiography it’s disturbing but good nonetheless) and his surreal sense of humour, which was so much a part of Big Brother’s Big Mouth (and seems also to be a big part of his stand-up routines) comes across in almost every line. He can be funny, disgusting, or terribly sad, sometimes all in the same paragraph. His descriptions of places and situations are particularly vivid. If the other people featured in the book don’t come across as strongly, this might be due to Russell himself being such a big character, rather than his writing style.

Just one of the things he describes incredibly well is the taking of drugs. I’m sure that everything he says is completely true. I’m sure taking heroin or acid would be an amazing, mind-blowing experience. Being drunk is an amazing, mind-blowing experience, or it is until you wake up the next day, remembering nothing at all or too much (not to mention the hangover). But while drugs can give you these highs that probably are a lot better than real life, it gives you lows as well. More lows than highs. And it ends up affecting other people too. I think I’ll just stick to real life. It might not give you that many highs but it’s worth it if it means avoiding all the lows.

Luckily, Brand describes his low moments very well too. The guy is a long way from being perfect and he probably isn’t all that nice but you do get the impression he’s very glad he’s not addicted to drugs anymore. Maybe he will cause people to take an interest in taking drugs but you can’t deny that, although he waits until the end of the book to do it, he also does a very good job of pointing out the downfalls.

Where Rainbows End (Cecelia Ahern)****

2009-11-17T16:14:00.003Z

It’s probably not Cecelia Ahern’s fault I consider her a hit-and-miss author. Probably anyone who tried to turn such magical ideas as she has into a book would struggle because almost every one of her ideas is outside the realms of possibility (not including the one about invisible friends, If You Could See Me Now. Trust me, they are real).

Where Rainbows End is slightly more grounded in reality than most but it also includes the ‘magic’ of two people’s being soulmates. Ahern’s central characters Rosie and Alex (Alex is a guy) are meant for each other but they kind of keep missing each other. They arrange to go to the school Prom together despite the small inconvenience of Alex’s living in the USA at the time but Alex’s flight is cancelled and the only guy without a date is so awful Rosie has to get drunk. And she ends up having a baby. Then Rosie realises she likes Alex but Alex goes off and gets married. Then Alex realises he likes Rosie but she goes off and gets married. Then Alex… you get the idea. I don’t know why they do it really. Surely marriage is bad enough if you actually love the person you’re marrying.

Rainbows End, like the Holly’s Inbox books, is a novel in letters. It starts off with Alex and Rosie aged 7 writing each other notes in class (or from their bedrooms on the many occasions when they’ve been banned from seeing one another). They later graduate to Instant Messaging each other in class (which is a bit surprising, I’m ten years younger than them and I’m sure we never had Instant Messaging in class, I didn’t even know how to do Instant Messaging till I was twenty) before mostly e-mailing when they’re adults. Alex moves to America when he and Rosie are in their late teens, which ensures they have good reason to continue writing to one another.

The novel in letters can be alienating because you never find out anything until someone writes about it in a letter or e-mail. You don’t know anything until it’s happened, which kind of rules out the idea of them dying tragically in each other’s arms. In this case, we barely see the two main characters together because they’re mostly writing to each other (although they do get to meet up every so often, where they take turns at making fools of themselves).

But in this book, it isn’t a problem. If you think about it, all books (apart from the present tense ones I suppose) involve reporting events. Many books are written in the first person – just like letters and e-mails. Also, the letters and e-mails in this book tend to be quite long, so in some ways it’s not much different from a multi-viewpoint book, with several pages from one person’s point of view, followed by several pages from the point of view of another person. Most of the book is Rosie and Alex, but Rosie’s daughter Katie, Katie’s best friend Toby, Rosie’s new friend Ruby, Rosie’s sister Steph and their parents all make regular appearances.

And the Instant Messages are so much like conversations, they flow naturally too. True, as far as Instant Messages go, they’re not terribly realistic. Ahern uses a bit of poetic licence, allowing the characters to interrupt each other mid-sentence. As far as I know, Instant Messages aren’t that advanced yet – I don’t think you can see what the other person is writing until you’ve pressed Send, so while someone might only read the first sentence before writing back, they can’t really interrupt you mid-sentence. But Ahern gets away with it. And if there isn’t an Instant Messaging system like that now, there probably will be at some point. And maybe this book is set in the future.

Woody and Nord: A Football Friendship (Gareth Southgate and Andy Woodman)*****

2009-11-10T16:34:00.001Z

I love football and I love Gareth Southgate, so I was always going to enjoy this book a lot. And I did, but not just for the reasons I was expecting to enjoy it. The book is about a friendship between two men, one who makes it as a Premiership and international star, and his friend who spends a lot of time sitting on the bench in the lower leagues.

The book offers a fascinating comparison not only between the two situations, but also between Then and Now. It is very difficult to imagine, for example, Aaron Ramsey of Arsenal cleaning his team-mate Andrei Arshavin’s boots, but this was an everyday occurrence when Gareth Southgate and Andy Woodman were young players. They had to clean mud-covered football boots, keep the changing rooms clean and tidy, do whatever other filthy and time-consuming jobs they were asked to do - and all for under £30 a week. There are rumours now of players of that age earning at least £45,000 a week.

But the book is so much more than that. The friendship between Gareth and Andy is the important thing, and it is exciting, interesting and also encouraging to read about two people who genuinely care for each other, and how it develops even though the two live very different lives (in the same profession, yes, but still very different). Many people have commented that Andy has been lucky to hang onto Gareth’s friendship – and to an extent, they’re right. Anyone who finds such a strong friendship as these two is lucky. But what they actually mean is that Andy is lucky to stay friends with someone who’s so rich. Anyone who reads this book will know that side of things never comes into it.

Gareth and Andy did have a sports writer to help them with the book, but the impression is that they wrote most of it themselves. And they can both write. Andy, as Gareth tells us many times, can be hilariously funny, and this is shown not only in his actions but in his writing style too. No matter what happens, he is always cheerful, and not in an annoying way either.

And although Gareth, in theory, has a much better life, you have no trouble at all understanding why it has often made him unhappy. Money does not make you happy and anyone who thinks it does is either mad or Scottish. How can money make you feel better if you think you’ve just let the country down? You can’t buy your team a trophy (this book was written before the invention of Manchester City. And if buying trophies were possible, I’d like to think Ryan Giggs would have bought one for Wales). And I’m not just talking about that penalty. Or any of the other three Gareth has missed. He’s a very sensitive man and a lot has happened to him. And he’s a brilliant writer too.

He’s also a really lovely man. I wrote to him a few months ago and he replied right in the middle of Middlesbrough’s relegation battle. Can you imagine Alex Ferguson or Chelsea’s latest manager (I know what his name is, Carlo Ancelotti, however there’s no guarantee he’ll still be there by the time I get around to posting my review) doing this? Well, I wouldn’t mind putting them into a relegation battle so we can find out…

And one more thing. The first two words of the book are ‘Mitcham Station’. Is there any better way to start a book than by naming a railway station that technically doesn’t exist anymore? The station has been rebuilt as a tram station, with two platforms served approximately every three minutes. Very different from the station described by Gareth and Andy, with its one platform and one train every half-hour. But it used to be a railway station and now it’s not a railway station, so it’s a disused railway station, isn’t it? And there is nothing in the world nicer than a book with two lovely protagonists (you know what I mean!) that’s all about football and disused railway stations. (Except maybe Pride and Prejudice, but I’m sure Jane Austen would have mentioned them if she could.)

The Secret Daughter (Catherine Spencer)**

2009-11-08T20:24:00.001Z

Another day, another Mills & Boon. This is from the Presents series which I think is now called Modern Romance. In other words, non-explicit sex and not a lot of it.

There were things I loved about this book, but so many things that infuriated me. Firstly, most importantly, the big twist is not just revealed in the blurb, it’s revealed in the TITLE. It would have been so much more exciting if this hadn’t been given away before I’d even read the first sentence. It’s actually a really interesting story, weightier than a lot of Mills & Boons. So I feel a bit deprived really.

The plot was probably slightly wasted on Mills & Boon. I don’t really mean that in a snobby way, but there’s a lot going on with all the characters, not just the central couple Imogen and Joe, and a 50,000 word novel where the main focus has to be on the romance doesn’t really give Catherine Spencer the opportunity to explore all the stories in detail. There are lots of really interesting characters who barely feature, such as Joe’s family and Imogen’s old nanny. And Imogen’s horrible mother Suzanne is great. Her behaviour is despicable from the beginning to a page or two from the end, but it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for her. She seems so unhappy. And her views aren’t so much wrong as desperately old-fashioned. She’d have got on fine a century or two ago.

Joe, like a lot of M&B heroes, really annoys me. I can understand why he finds Imogen irritating, but the aggressive way he treats her is pretty disgusting. As usual, he expects all to be forgiven because he loves her, but I wouldn’t forgive that easily. Maybe he does love her (although I certainly wasn’t convinced), but that doesn’t change all the horrible things he said to her, and it also doesn’t change the fact that the same could happen again the next time he gets stressed about something.

A quickie wedding that certainly isn’t based on love is the last thing Imogen needs. The poor girl really has nothing on which to base her expectations for a happy marriage. Yes, she is irritating, and not very intelligent, and her sudden u-turn from being snobby about Joe to practically begging him to love her does seem rather pathetic. But no-one deserves to be treated like that. All I can say for Imogen is she’s very lucky she lives in a Mills & Boon. It’s her only hope of happily ever after.

Secrets in Texas (Carrie Weaver)**

2009-11-04T16:10:00.000Z

I wouldn’t usually review a Mills and Boon. After all, they only seem to be available in the shops for a month or so, banished from the shelves once the new shipment comes in. But why not review it? They’re common enough in charity shops after all and the chance of finding this one will be marginally greater if I re-donate it.

Secrets in Texas comes from the Super Romance series. I haven’t read all that many of them, but as far as I can make out they form a series of books that place the hero and heroine in great danger, often with some sort of crime-based plot that to some extent takes precedence over the romance.

In this book, law enforcement officer Angel Harrison has to infiltrate a group of Mormons by marrying Matthew Stone, the son of the head Mormon who is returning to the fold out of concern for the family he left behind years ago, and pretending he wants to return to the Mormon ways. Angel comes with him as his wife – they’re legally married, but certainly to begin with neither of them are even thinking of consummation. Or that’s when they tell themselves anyway.

But Matt finds himself falling for Angel’s strength and free spirit, enjoying watching such a powerful woman and trained killer playing the role of the devoted, passive wife. And Angel discovers that, despite the abusive marriage that led her to train as a law enforcement officer in the first place, maybe it will be possible for her to love again.

The characters are rather nicely done. Angel is very funny, and she and Matt have a great rapport. Matt is often called Matthew (one of the common literary names for unfaithful wankers) in this book, but despite his Uncle Jonathon’s demands that he take a second wife, he is faithful to Angel. Jonathon himself is a real monster, but there is something vaguely sexy about him that probably attracted his many wives. His ‘favourite’ wife, Eleanor, is a fascinating character, such as is not often found in Mills & Boon. Carrie Weaver reveals her character gradually and cleverly.

But other parts of the book really bother me. I know a lot of people object to Mormons, and most readers will probably sympathise with Angel’s disgust – and certainly there is something very wrong in the particular sect she visits. But it is still a religion and a way of life which I’m sure makes some people very happy. If Weaver had written about an evil Catholic community, for example, I’m sure there would have been some very strong objections; if she had written about an evil Muslim community, she really would have been in trouble. So I don’t think she should be passing comments on Mormons like this. Just because the concepts are completely alien to our society, it doesn’t mean they are wrong in other people’s. It happens all the time in the Bible.

The plot is also a bit questionable. Weaver has some good ideas, and she certainly has a flair for creating tense drama, but I didn’t really understand what Jonathon was up to. He seemed to be committing so many crimes at once, it just became confusing. At best, he is completely and dangerously amoral, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be committing every possible crime on offer to him.

I think really, I’d like to give it three stars. There were parts of the book I really enjoyed, such as when Angel and Matt decided to rattle the headboard in order to fool the bitch sleeping next door into thinking they were having passionate, enthusiastic sex. It’s almost a disappointment when they start doing it for real. And any scene with Eleanor in is great. But my reservations about the book are so strong, I’ll give it two.

Got You Back (Jane Fallon)**

2009-11-02T01:08:00.005Z

I loved Jane Fallon’s first novel, Getting Rid of Matthew. I gave it three stars at the time but I think that was mean. It’s definitely a book I still enjoy thinking about months later. It’s very funny, with three love triangle characters who are engaging, if not technically likeable. But it’s also a clever novel that turns a clichéd situation into something a bit different.

So when I saw Got You Back in the shops, I was expecting more of the same from Fallon. No matter that the plot had a similar-sounding love triangle. It was hilarious last time, so I didn’t mind having the same plot rehashed with a few differences. Not if it was funny.

It wasn’t funny. It started really well, with Stephanie finding texts from a mysterious K on her husband James’ mobile (yes, it’s two-timing James again). She discovers they’re from a woman called Katie, and she phones her, introducing herself as James’ wife – not ex-wife, as Katie thought. Katie is all for telling James she knows straight away but Stephanie decides it might be more fun to make him suffer a bit first. So when Katie dyes and styles her hair like Stephanie’s, and when both women buy identical tops, comedy does seem imminent.

But the comedy soon disappears, and it becomes yet another story about a two-timing husband who’s more in love with himself than his women, a wife who jumps straight into a new relationship the first chance she gets, and a girlfriend who would certainly have boiled the guy’s bunny if he happened to bring one home from the surgery where he works as a vet. It’s not deep enough or moving enough to be a serious dramatic story, but it’s not funny enough to be anything else.

Without all the humour, the story falls flat. Neither James, his girlfriend Katie, nor his wife Stephanie are particularly engaging characters. I didn’t like them or care what happened to him. There are some vaguely amusing moments at Stephanie’s work, where she tries to persuade various wannabes not to go to an awards ceremony with their naughty bits on show. But I wasn’t that interested, and while I could understand why Stephanie was feeling upset and stressed, the unkind and unprofessional manner in which she treated her clients was really worrying. Stephanie was extremely lucky they all happened to be nice people.

Stephanie’s workmate Natasha is my favourite character but even she’s inconsistent. One minute, she’s trying to think up an appropriate punishment for James that doesn’t involve causing GBH. The next, she’s hiding from one of her clients because she’s frightened of them. It doesn’t quite make sense. And as for Stephanie’s son Finn, I can fully understand her concerns that he might be psychotic. Given his propensity for drawing mutilated animals, perhaps it would be better if he didn’t take after James and become a vet.

Also, I find the book difficult to read. A lot of it is written in the pluperfect tense, which is quite alienating. I used to loathe books in the present tense with a passion and I’d rather have died than actually written one myself. But now I love the present tense best because everything seems so immediate. And if you do want to do a flashback you can put it into the past tense and you hardly notice the difference.

Got You Back is in the past tense which can have the advantage of sounding more literary than the present tense but it means you have to use the pluperfect if you want to make it clear something has happened before the events that have just been described. Usually this is fine as there will usually be only a couple of uses of the pluperfect - enough to get your attention - before it switches back to the preterite. But when just about every verb is preceded by ‘had’, as happens all the time in this book, it can sound really clunky.

It also really brings home to you the fact that things have already happened. The characters/author are only keeping you up to date of happenings in their life in a second-hand sort of way. Even in real life it’s not unknown for people to start talking about past events in the present tense (“So I’m standing there, then suddenly I hear this voice behind me so I turn around and there he is, and he’s looking at me, and I’m looking at him, and I’m just like in shock…”) or something like that. Then in one chapter a character might be worrying about a problem they have, and by the next chapter they’ll have moved on to a different problem, and you won’t here anything about the first problem until it’s casually mentioned later on it’s been solved. I felt a bit shut out from it all.

The Chocolate Lovers' Club (Carole Matthews)****

2009-10-29T22:49:00.004Z

I read The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet first and really enjoyed it. Then I read the first in the series, The Chocolate Lovers’ Club and I really enjoyed that too. Both are really great comedies, with some really amusing characters and situations, as well as some more serious storylines that nevertheless fit into the book well. There’s just one problem. The two books are pretty much the same.

Yes, the characters and storylines have moved on a little bit between one book and the next and there are differences, but they mostly have exactly the same problem. It’s true that the same problems can hang around for years and it’s not unusual to think you’ve solved one problem, only for it to come back again. In that sense, it’s a realistic book. But you don’t want two stories about the same set of characters to be that much alike.

There are parts of the book that aren’t funny at all. Lucy’s complete and total inability to cope with any kind of job is terrifying. Even I’d have done better than her. I’d have done better with driving that van and I don’t even have a driving licence for a car. And if I’d trashed that bookshop – which I never would have done, at least not to that extent – I wouldn’t run away and leave the whole mess behind for my elderly boss to find when he got back from his hospital appointment. I’d want to, I really would. But you can’t do things like that.

But Lucy is mostly an adorable character. Once the incidents mentioned above are over with and she’s back to her old job and back to sitting at her desk, doing no work at all (she’s much less trouble when she’s doing nothing), you can put your reservations about her out of your mind, and start loving her again.

Then there’s the sex-mad Chantal. Yes, she is incredibly stupid and I wouldn’t blame anyone for calling her a slag. She does have a bit of an obsession. But she too is a very nice person. Nadia is amazing the way she deals with her young son and her husband’s gambling addiction and their money worries, not to mention the fact she still has some strength to spare for providing support for her friends.

Autumn is perhaps a bit too nice but I also think she’s shockingly unprofessional. She runs a craft class to support young people who have been in trouble with the law. It’s very commendable but when Autumn decides to turn to a bit of criminality herself, I can’t help questioning her integrity. Yes, it was in order to help Chantal who had got herself into trouble and was herself the victim of a crime. But that doesn’t make it okay that Autumn should either a) break the law herself or b) let the former criminals she’s supposed to be helping think there are times when it’s okay to do things like that.

The law-breaking section is brilliant though. Very funny and I did kind of wish I was there with them. But it doesn’t make it right.

The Outlaw Varjak Paw (S F Said)***

2009-10-25T15:03:00.004Z

I hadn’t read the sequel before, but I thought I had a pretty good idea of what it was about from the opera. I didn’t. The opera only really shows the very end and the book has different characters in.

The problem with sequels is that they can be disappointing. Even the most brilliant characters can have their limits, and only so many stories can be told about them. Also, Varjak has learned all the Seven Skills of the Way in the last book, Varjak Paw. So where could the character go from here?

But S. F. Said seems to have thought about this. Sally Bones makes only a fleeting – although very memorable – appearance in Varjak Paw but she’s someone who stays in your mind. She’s not the sort of character you’d create, only to limit her to one appearance. And in The Outlaw Varjak Paw, the character is given the story she deserves. She’s one of the most chilling villains I’ve ever read about and remains so even now I’ve read the book, and I know all her secrets. (Or I think I do.)

Varjak defeated The Gentlemen at the end of Varjak Paw, and has now returned to life on the streets. However, he’s not out of danger as cats are still disappearing – or worse. In a way, it surprises me this is a children’s book, as a lot of it is terrifying. But I don’t think I was scared of anything much as a child. Now, I’ve realised the world is dangerous and there are people out there who want to hurt you. In some ways, I haven’t grown up at all, and some people would say I’m quite babyish in the things I’ve scared of. But I do think adults have a more developed sense of fear.

Jalal no longer needs to teach Varjak The Way – although his powers have conveniently and rather inexplicably deserted him. I never quite understand why Varjak lost his powers or how he got them back, but it did give the situation an extra sense of urgency. Jalal teaches Varjak other things instead – and, as in the earlier book, Jalal’s teachings help Varjak as he progresses through the story.

Said is great at creating strong characters and there are lots of new ones to enjoy here. The Scratch Sisters (for some reason I keep calling them The Snatch Sisters), a trio of kung-fu Siamese cats, are my favourites. Then there are a couple of Sally Bones’ minions who change side, Omar and Ossie, who seem rather more cuddly. I loved the way such different individuals – mostly cats, but with Cludge the dog, of course - were bonding together in order to fight Sally Bones.

But the veiled sex references didn’t seem quite appropriate. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen the opera, where Holly is presented as being around sixteen, with Varjak no more than ten. So when Said starts hinting that there might be Holljak kittens before too long, it’s a little bit disturbing. Maybe if I hadn’t seen the opera, I’d think it was sweet, but I have, so I don’t.

Varjak Paw (S F Said)****

2009-10-19T23:55:00.005+01:00

I wasn’t going to review this because it’s a children’s book.

But I’m not sure that’s any reason not to review it.

It’s still a book and I’m sure I’m not the only adult in the world who would find this book enjoyable. Not every adult will enjoy it, but not every adult will enjoy the other books I’ve reviewed. Even I didn’t enjoy a lot of them. Varjak Paw is written in quite a literary style but it’s easy to understand. I’m not sure what age group it’s aimed at but I never felt it was babyish in any way. Varjak and his friends are in many ways a lot more grown up than the adult characters I’ve written about on this blog.

Some people might choose not to read the book because it’s about cats rather than humans. But animals can make fascinating protagonists. And a cat with super powers makes a nice change from all the superhumans. I kind of kept imagining Varjak as a human in this book because the book Varjak Paw is very like Act One of the opera Varjak Paw, and they were dressed as humans. My friend Barry did a really nice review of the opera, so go and read that if you want to.

I first read this book a couple of years ago. I picked it up because I wanted something to read and I got into it really quickly. Then I went to see the Varjak Paw opera, and I loved it so much, I decided to read the book again – and also the sequel, which I didn’t know about before.

The characters are really lovely, especially Varjak. The basic plot isn’t anything new: there have been lots of stories about scared, physically weak characters who become heroes – but it’s a plotline I really like to read because I would quite like it if one day I became a hero. Everyone thought I was brave when I went on the Underground two days after the terrorist attacks (even though I never went on the Underground normally because I was scared it would make me sick), but mostly people think I’m quite pathetic. I think it all depends on how you view bravery – I do things that scare me all the time – but a character like Varjak is almost always going to be appealing.

I wasn’t sure about his friend Holly at first – she is described as spiky-looking, and the word ‘spiky’ suits her personality as well. But I warmed to her once I could see her relationship with her friend Tam. Tam isn’t very clever but she is very sweet – and it’s good to have such a loveable character who’s a bit fat and is happy to stay that way. I wish they were more human characters like that. A lot of outwardly abrasive people like Holly wouldn’t show such patience with people who are slower than them – Holly is very bright – but Holly is lovely to Tam and also their dog friend Cludge, who makes Tam look like a candidate for Mensa. Cludge is a great character too - fiercely loyal, like a lot of fictional dogs, but quite original I think.

Another thing I really like about the characters is that it’s not just a matter of Varjak the SuperCat and his three sidekicks. Varjak would really struggle without Cludge’s strength and Holly’s intelligence, and I like that because it makes Varjak less like a god, and makes his friends a really important part of the story.

It was also really interesting the way Varjak learns a little bit more about the Way as he goes through the book. The Seven Skills of the Way help cats with things like hunting and fighting, as well as helping them to know themselves and others. It would have been too much to take in all at one go – although Said does give us a tantalising glimpse at the beginning, when the Elder Paw, Varjak’s grandfather, tells Varjak the names of three of the seven skills. Slow Time, Moving Circles and Shadow Walking do sound very intriguing.

The book is fast-paced and full of action. When I heard there was going to be an opera, I knew that would work really well – the coming of age theme happens a lot in opera as well. There’s also a lot of humour – such as Varjak’s attempts to find a dog to talk to – and the character of Sally Bones is truly terrifying. Sally Bones is hardly in the book at all, but she makes a really strong impression. I could complain that her story has no real ending in Varjak Paw, but in a way her scene is a prequel to the next book, where she becomes a major character. There’s a really scary picture of her as well. Dave McKean has done some great illustrations all the way through. Occasionally they make the text difficult to read but I really like them. Adult books don’t have enough pictures. A good illustrator can add a lot to a story.

Holly's Inbox: Scandal in the City (Holly Denham)****

2009-10-13T19:16:00.010+01:00

Holly’s Inbox (which can be viewed on the Internet) is a great idea that probably worked really well online, but Holly’s Inbox the book didn’t quite work. For Holly’s Inbox: Scandal in the City, most of the difficulties have been completely ironed out. Perhaps the reason why Holly’s Inbox didn’t quite work as a book was because it hadn’t been conceived as one. It was more of a soap opera online. In soap operas, it’s just one incident after another, and very few long-term storylines. But presumably when Holly Denham started work on her next lot of fictional e-mails, she knew another book was a strong possibility – and Holly’s Inbox: Scandal in the City does feel like a novel.

The fact that it’s more like a novel does in some ways make it seem less like a series of e-mails. A lot of the e-mails read a lot more like instant messages or spoken conversations. But the characters do have an amazing amount of time each day in which to send e-mails. I don’t have that amount of time and I don’t have a job. And all e-mails take place at work! If I ever get a job I’ll never spend all that time e-mailing. It’s not even as though their jobs are easy. Somehow, none of them seem to have e-mail at home and it’s also surprising that close friends would e-mail one another the juicy details at work rather than catching up at the weekend. And there’s also the problem that anything not described in an e-mail is not seen by the reader.

But you can’t have everything, and it’s difficult to see how Denham – or anyone – could have done it any better. Besides. I’d rather have dramatic e-mails like these that make a great novel than e-mails that sound like e-mails but don’t really work in a book. I bought Scandal in the City because I wanted to read a book, and a book is exactly what I got.

Maybe Denham could have varied things a bit as the scene where Trisha writes e-mails about Holly’s being absent from work due to a broken heart is almost exactly like the scene in Holly’s Inbox where Trisha writes e-mails about Holly’s being absent from work due to a broken heart. But at least this guy was vaguely worth it.

I didn’t like Holly in Holly’s Inbox, but I liked her a lot in this book. It annoyed me slightly (and okay yes I was jealous) that everyone clearly adored Holly but I was agreeing with them before too long. She is very funny and the insanity of her day-to-day life contrasts surprisingly well with her considerable abilities at work. Holly is amazing at her job. Funny, friendly – and a real professional. Despite the amount of time she spends e-mailing.

The other characters are brilliantly done too. Trisha didn’t feature a lot during the early part of the book, and I missed her dry sarcasm, but she was in it more later on. The adorably dippy Claire and the calm and apparently conservative Marie are a great addition to the team. The wonderfully filthy yet wonderfully innocent Aisha returns, along with flamboyant Jason, who is trying desperately to make his boyfriend dump him. Then there are asides from Holly’s mad family, and the one everyone thinks is mad, Holly’s delightfully intrepid Granny.

There are two great villains too. One just pops up occasionally and gives you a good laugh; the other is very cleverly written: a total bitch who is really nice to Holly in a way that doesn’t quite disguise her bitchiness.

There was a rather unrealistic bit at the end – which stood out mostly because I could imagine the rest of the book happening to real people. Even the mad bits. Not only is this moment unrealistic, it’s also not the sort of thing I’d have expected the company directors to put up with for a minute. But it was so much fun, I think Denham gets away with it.

Second Chance (Jane Green)**

2009-10-11T15:27:00.004+01:00

I only read this because my friend offered it to me cheap. She hadn’t been able to finish it, and there were several moments – maybe one on every page – where I wondered if I was going to give up on it too. But it did pick up a bit in the middle, and it is a lot better than the other Jane Green book I read, Straight Talking.

Second Chance begins when a group of old schoolfriends get together for the first time for years following the death of Tom, another member of their group. He died in a terrorist attack. This annoyed me a bit as a lot of people really did lose friends and family in this way and it somehow seems a bit too close to the events to start making money out of it by writing a book. I don’t mind stories set in the Second World War though, so maybe I’ll get used to terrorist stories.

They sit around the table and talk about their lives, all displaying an irritating characteristic of talking about themselves without the use of a first person subject pronoun. (“Am this. Did that. Married X.”) Just don’t hear this very often, so was surprised when this large-ish group of people who have had completely different lives all start doing it at once. Didn’t find it very realistic. Am not however accustomed to sitting round in large groups.

The characters are a lot stronger than this opening suggests. The main character, Holly, drives me mad – like most fictional Hollys, she is one of the most miserable creations in fiction. We’re all supposed to love her, but I just wanted her to shut up and go away somewhere where I didn’t have to read about her. Then there’s the allegedly sweet, gentle Olivia, who somehow has the filthiest mouth of all of them. Paul, the organiser, somehow fades into the background, but Anna and Saffron between them make the book worthwhile.

Anna is bossy Paul’s wife. She unable to get pregnant and not very happy, but manages to push this aside in order to help a group of people she hardly knows. Maybe part of the reason I find it difficult to admire Holly for this characteristic is because Anna had it in shitloads.

Saffron is an actress who has been touted as the Next Best Thing for years, but hasn’t yet made it. Saffron has done a number of stupid things in her time, and has a bad habit of saying the first thing that comes into her head, but there’s something very endearing about her: something very normal, even though her life isn’t the sort of thing most people can imagine.

But Green makes it very difficult for us to form our own opinions of her characters. All the way through, she keeps telling us what to think. She stops the narrative in order to give us some anecdote that apparently proves her point. But I don’t want her telling me all this. I prefer to be able to form my own opinions – and there are much more subtle ways for an author to make a character’s personality clear. Maybe I’m less likely to pick up on subtle things but I don’t want any author beating it into my head with a rolling pin either.

She tells us how horrible Marcus is to Holly right from the start – which left me wanting to defend the poor guy. He’s obviously a total prat but he's also very insecure. He isn’t a completely unsympathetic character although I did go off him later. I sympathised with him a lot more than Holly because Holly had the author bigging her up at every opportunity, whereas poor Marcus is constantly put down. No wonder he wants to show how good he is all the time. I wouldn’t want to marry him though!

There are good bits in this book. You could just read the Saffron bits and ignore the rest. It would be quite a good book then. But it would also be a very short book.

The Wag's Diary (Alison Kervin)****

2009-10-05T17:21:00.003+01:00

I know I’m supposed to admire Wags for being so well-dressed but I’m really not sure if they’re the ideal role models. Just because Victoria Beckham can cope with being Size 0 when she has three young boys, a ‘busy life’ as the wife of a footballer and a career as a fashion designer (and sometimes a ‘singer’) – not to mention the fact she seems to spend half her life shopping, which is exhausting – it doesn’t mean everyone in the world can cope with being Size 0, and it certainly doesn’t mean people ought to try.

Your health is a million times more important than how you look, and you certainly shouldn’t risk your health just because some footballer’s wife is skinny enough to fit down a drainpipe. I’m Size 0 because I have problems with my stomach, but if anyone decided to start copying me I’d be horrified. It really isn’t that good being thin. I’ve probably only got my stomach condition in the first place because I didn’t have the life skills to feed myself properly when I went to study away from home. Now I can’t eat enough to get myself up to a healthy weight, and I have dizzy spells all the time. People who try to get this thin on purpose are morons. And Louise Redknapp (who is kind of a Wag and isn’t Size 0) would agree with me.

As for the clothes thing, I’m just not interested, and if I do ever marry Gareth Southgate, which I won’t because he’s already married and there’s NO WAY I’m moving to Middlesbrough (it looks like a lovely place, but it doesn’t have the West End, and no I’m NOT talking about shops). But anyway even if Middlesbrough was relocated to London and I did somehow end up being a Wag (according to this book, football managers have Wags too), I WOULD NOT start wearing short skirts and little tops and high heels to football matches. I’d rather DIE. There’s only one kind of top you should wear to football matches (and no I am NOT giving you fashion advice) and that’s a shirt featuring the team you most want to win. High heels are stupid because there’s a million steps to go up and I fall over when I’m wearing them on flat ground and how are you supposed to jump up and down when your team scores if you’re wearing heels? Skirts are okay, but not without underwear. It’s too cold, and if I want to relax and sit with my legs open like my guy mates, I’d like to be able to do that without being indecent. And if you think it’s indecent for me to have my legs open under any circumstances – well, all your idols do it! That’s how we know they’re wearing no knickers.

Tracie Martin, the fictional Wag in this novel, is the Waggiest Wag in the universe. She spends most of her time thinking about hair extensions (I’ve never knowingly even seen a hair extension: if you want long hair, just grow it, that’s what I say) and what she’s going to wear to her husband Dean’s next match. So it should really be the most boring book in the universe for me. And some of the time, it is. But it’s also really funny because (I hope) Tracie is an exaggerated version of a Wag, and the way she worries about things I’ve never even heard of is hysterical. And her driving is worse than mine, which is always nice to see.

Tracie is completely ridiculous – but she is a very nice person, and that’s part of what makes the book really fun. We’re not just reading about some bitch we’re expected to admire for her dress sense. We’re reading about a not particularly intelligent but really lovely person who happens to care very much about clothes. I can put up with the clothes business and the hair business and the makeup business (although I’d rather die than go shopping with her) because it’s great to read about such a likeable character. A lot of the time, we’re laughing at her for being so stupid, but always in a very sympathetic way. Tracie always means well. And it’s not like I’ve never done something stupid. Maybe not in the last half-hour or so, but certainly in the last hour.

Alison Kervin clearly knows both football and Wags very well, which makes the book even better. Tracie’s daughter is named Paskia Rose, which is somehow the most perfectly Waggish name I can think of. I’ve never heard of anything called Paskia (maybe she was born at Easter?), but it’s not a real name, and that’s all that matters. Tracie wants Paskia to grow up to be a Wag like her, but unfortunately she takes after her father, Dean, and is a very gifted footballer. The only difference between Dean and Paskia is that Paskia always scores into the right net. (I do find it a bit hard to swallow that Dean once played for Arsenal, but I suppose even Ashley Cole played for Arsenal.)

The only thing I don’t like about this book is that Tracie becomes a hugely famous blogger. Apart from the fact I don’t like reading about writers, and I especially don’t want to have to read samples of their work (it does seem a bit like Kervin is congratulating herself on her own writing ability every time a character says how great Tracie’s writing is). But Tracie’s blogs are hysterically funny. And they really are great and it's not surprising everyone loves them. And yes, I am jealous!

There is a serious storyline in this book but it’s really a bit weak. It is interesting but it’s a lot less original than the rest of the book and I don’t think even mild child abuse really fits in with a comedy. Also, some parts of the story are left unresolved at the end as Tracie seems to have forgotten about them. But perhaps we’ll find out more in Kervin’s sequel – which I’m really looking forward to reading.

My Best Friend's Girl (Dorothy Koomson)***

2009-10-02T21:32:00.001+01:00

I nearly didn’t read this. Dorothy Koomson’s The Chocolate Run was such a disappointment, I probably wouldn’t have read this if it hadn’t been from the library. But luckily it was from the library, so I did read it.

At first, I was a bit worried that I wasn’t going to like it. All this soppy clichéd deathbed forgiveness stuff is bad for my emetophobia, and cute precocious little kids aren’t that much better. Kamryn, the main character, really did seem to be a bit of a bitch, although at least I preferred her to her friend Adele, who slept with Kamryn’s fiancé. The fact that Adele was dying of cancer when the book began didn’t really make her actions any more forgiveable. She doesn’t deserve to die – but Kamryn does not deserve to be betrayed by her fiancé and her best friend like that, no matter how much of a bitch she is.

But that, in a way, is what this book’s all about – and quite possibly what parts of The Chocolate Run were about as well. Most people aren’t perfect.

Kamryn isn’t always a particularly nice person to read about. This put me off at first, but I ended up liking her in the end. She can be very nasty, but so can everyone. She can also be very nice. She just makes a very bad first impression on the people she meets in real life, and so in a way it’s only natural that readers should experience some of the same misgivings.

The danger with writing about a character like this is that some people will give up on the book because they don’t want to read about such horrible people. I was very tempted to give up. It’s possible I would have done if I didn’t have a book blog to slag it off in. But I did kind of want to know what was going to happen. Or not so much what was going to happen – the book was quite predictable - it was more that I wanted to know how it was going to happen.

Sometimes, when you’re reading a book, you can tell what’s going to happen – but you can’t think how the author is going to reach this conclusion in a convincing way. Or also, as in the case of Marian Keyes’ Angels, you can see that something is causing a character to behave very badly, and you want to know the reason for this. The explanation, when it comes, might be a very good explanation in theory, but (especially when we don’t find out until near the end of the book) it’s not always quite enough to make me like the character. So Koomson really had a very difficult job on her hands: she had to evoke the change in Kamryn convincingly, and in such a way that her readers ended up liking her despite everything.

Koomson did this really well. She moved from one situation to another very neatly. In some ways, it would have been nice if the story hadn’t suddenly jumped forward a year just before the end of the book, as quite a lot happened, and I’d have liked to read about it. (So by then, I must have liked Kamryn a lot – if I don’t like a character, the last thing I want is to read more about her than I have to!) But the parts of Kamryn’s story Koomson did tell showed her to be a fascinating character.

My Best Friend’s Girl is also a very moving book, but anyone who can write reasonably well and treat this sort of subject matter with sensitivity would have struggled not to make the book moving. The things that make the book impressive is that Koomson has created a horrible yet compelling and eventually likeable main character – and that some of the book is really funny.

She also creates a gorgeous hero. There are two men in the book. One is really gorgeous and sweet; the other one is a bit of a wanker (in my opinion), but does have a really good rapport with Kamryn. For most of the book, I was horribly afraid Kamryn was going to end up with the horrible one. (Yes, I cared about her enough to worry about that.) Luckily, she ended up with the one I liked. But it wouldn’t surprise me if some people preferred the other one.

Shopaholic & Sister (Sophie Kinsella)***

2009-10-01T17:50:00.001+01:00

I love Sophie Kinsella, so maybe this book is only disappointing because I know she can be brilliant. My expectations are really high where Kinsella is concerned, and it’s possible this book would have got four stars if it had been written by someone who’s a bit hit and miss for me like Cecelia Ahern (she’s on 2 hits and 2 misses so far). Or if someone to whom I reluctantly gave a second chance wrote it, like Jane Green anything even halfway good is a nice surprise because my expectations aren’t that high. But anything less than perfect from Kinsella is going to be a disappointment.

No, that probably isn’t fair! But who said I had to be objective?

The fourth Shopaholic book has lots of humour. Becky is really sweet and lovely, and Luke is a sex god, and some of their exchanges are just delightful. But I kind of got the feeling all the good bits had been done before. It was still fun when Becky realised she’d bought far more stuff on honeymoon than she’d realised, and no surprise that she would rather look a bit deranged than miss out on the chance of the hottest handbag on the market – okay, it is a handbag with an angel on it, but even so, making deals with random strangers thus ensuring that other shoppers unfairly miss out on the bag does seem to be going a bit far. It was still quite funny though.

But surely there was no need for Becky to get Luke’s business in trouble yet again. Becky is so much funnier when the situations she gets into aren’t so horribly serious.

The idea of Becky’s sister Jess who hates shopping was wonderful in theory, but didn’t quite work for me in practice because I didn’t like Jess. There’s nothing wrong with not liking shopping. I hate it. I don’t mind going into bookshops and buying books, and if Waterstones or Blackwall’s or something like that started selling clothes as well, maybe I wouldn’t mind buying clothes in there. But Becky is a lovely person. The idea of going shopping with Becky does make me want to scream, although maybe we could turn it into a fair exchange whereby I go shopping with her, and she gives me Luke. I could certainly bring myself to go along with that.

Jess seemed to be set up as the complete opposite of Becky, and that was quite funny at first. But she didn’t seem to be nearly so rounded a character as most of those in Kinsella’s books. Also, she’s really rude. It’s not an accidental rudeness, which would have been fine. You never get the impression Jess is being rude because she’s stressed or scared or because she simply has no idea what she’s saying. She just seems to say whatever would discomfit Becky the most – which would be fine if Kinsella wrote light, frothy, on-the-surface slapsticky books with shallow characterisation. But she doesn’t.

The ending was also very predictable. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of predictability at times: we do always know that things will turn out okay for Becky. But the ending to Shopaholic & Sister was the most clichéd ending imaginable, and I know Kinsella is capable of better.

A Place Called Here (Cecelia Ahern)**

2009-09-30T16:31:00.003+01:00

Not another therapy story! This time it’s Sandy – a tall, brunette named Sandy Shortt: is it just me who didn’t find that funny? – who sees the school counsellor about her obsessive habit of looking for everything she’s lost. Of course, Sandy is so wonderful, the counsellor ends up falling in love with her, and, once she’s left school, she ends up ‘seeing’ him in a completely different sense. I prefer Sandy and Gregory to Tasia and Louise in Straight Talking, but it still doesn’t quite work because there doesn’t seem to be any point to it.

As usual, Cecelia Ahern has had a wonderful idea for a story: that all missing things and people go to another world, and that’s why some things will just never be found, like my copy of Rubber Rabbit. Sandy became interested in missing people as a child when the school bully Jenny-May went missing. As an adult, Sandy runs a missing persons agency. But there are some people who can’t be found – until Sandy suddenly ends up in the missing persons world herself.

We’ve all heard a lot about children going missing lately. One thing I really did like about this book was that Jenny-May wasn’t made out to be perfect. She wasn’t a nice person at all, and I respect Sandy for being able to admit that. I also respect Ahern for not making Jenny-May into the cutest little girl who ever existed. When kids go missing, it annoys me so much when people go on about how they must be found because they’re so beautiful, friendly, intelligent etc. So, if they are ugly, anti-social and stupid we shouldn’t look for then? Of course we should. Don’t look for them because they’re cute. Look for them because they’re someone’s baby.

Jenny-May was a bitch. She was horrible to Sandy. But she was still someone’s baby and Sandy still wanted to find her.

Unfortunately, this is Sandy’s only redeeming characteristic. I do sympathise with Sandy’s need to get away from people, and to spend most of her time on her own, but I’m sure it would have been possible for Ahern to make her seem a bit nicer. She doesn’t seem to care about anyone except herself and the missing people.

The book has some great moments. Some of it’s funny. But some parts just don’t work. Like when Sandy, on arriving in the missing persons world, pretends she runs an acting agency instead of a missing persons agency. This was to give her the chance to meet people she’s searched for, and tell them about their families during their ‘audition’, without them knowing her real job. When she suddenly finds herself putting on a play, it’s the perfect opportunity for her to learn something about the value of human companionship. But Sandy mostly pretends the play doesn’t exist. She’s not interested, so she lets everyone else do the work. Total unfairness. It’s very easy to lose interest in her after that.

Straight Talking (Jane Green)*

2009-09-28T20:07:00.002+01:00

I love reading. I really do. But every so often, I come across a book that makes me wonder why the f*** it was published. So I keep on reading, hoping I can find the answer. Sometimes the problem is that I just don’t appreciate the book myself, but I can understand why other people would. Other times, I just don’t get it.

I don’t get Straight Talking.

It’s all about a girl called Tasha who sleeps around a lot. Well, her name is really Anastasia, but she’s Tasha for short. Except, the first time she tells us her nickname, she says it’s ‘Tasia, pronounced Tasha’. But from that point on it’s never Tasia, always Tasha. Okay, I would never have guessed that Tasia could be pronounced Tasha if she hadn’t told us. But she did tell us once, and as my IQ is not in single figures, I’m more than happy to read Tasia as Tasha for the rest of the book. What I am not willing is for Jane Green (or Tasha: maybe this is a character thing) to assume I’m so stupid, she needs to spell it Tasha all the way through. That’s just insulting.

I also hates the way Tasia (yes, that’s how I’m going to spell it) talks to me all the way through. Quite apart from the fact that I would rather turn bulimic than listen to her for any length of time (and I say that as a raging emetophobic), she keeps telling me what I’m thinking. NO-ONE tells me what I’m thinking. Or rather, most people learn not to do it because they don’t get it right. But as Tasia is a character in a book, I can’t say, ‘no, you’re wrong, I’m not thinking you can’t possibly fall in love after ‘only’ nine months. Of course you can! Is there a legal limit or something? Thou shalt not declare thineself in love until ten months have passed? No, there isn’t. Not that I’m saying I believe you were in love with Simon – you weren’t. I’m just saying you can’t read my mind, Tasia, so stop trying!

And don’t even get me started on the sex. At the start of the book, she seems to be averaging about one bloke per chapter – it seems to add up to several a week. I’m sure there are some perfectly nice people in the world who genuinely enjoy sex as a regular activity, and like a bit of variation where the partner is concerned. But Tasia isn’t a nice girl. She just isn’t. She treats her friends like dog poo. There’s one bit where she’s absolutely devastated and she wants her friends to come round and look after her a bit. Not unreasonable. But then she says she wants Mel and Andy (two of the members of her gang of four), but she doesn’t want the other one, Emma. Of course, I do think Emma’s much better off not hanging around with this cow who sneers at her for being rich, but I just felt, poor Emma. Isn’t she going to feel just a little bit hurt about being left out like that?

Then there’s another time when she’s called the girls together so they can make a fuss of her, and Andy says something about herself. Shock, horror, crime of the century! How DARE Andy make herself the centre of attention when they’re supposed to be talking about Tasia? Okay, yes, I do agree that Andy likes to talk about herself, and, yes, maybe it is a bit annoying sometimes. But that part was actually hilarious because Tasia is by far the worst offender in that regard.

Tasia is supposed to be insecure. At least, I’m pretty sure she is. But she keeps banging on about how beautiful and successful she is, and how she’s superior to everyone in the world. Um, not the best way to get sympathy, Tasia. Although actually, I have to say, I did start feeling some sympathy for her about halfway through. Not because poor Tasia is so insecure. Not because poor Tasia was dumped by the man she thought she loved. Certainly not because poor Tasia’s best mate has the audacity to be in love with her. My sympathy for Tasia was because she was a deluded, horrible cow, and she just had no idea. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen, and it was such a relief to remember she isn’t real.

Maybe this was all a clever ploy on Green’s part. Maybe we were supposed to see Tasia for what she was, but end up liking her for it. But I didn’t. Part of the problem is probably that I did not find Green’s writing style very readable – and this might well be a personal thing. Green would probably hate my writing (and if she is reading this, she’s probably thinking I’m the deluded, horrible cow, and unfortunately not even a fictional one). But some of her storytelling methods are just bizarre.

Large chunks of it take place in therapy. I really don’t see the point. Especially when Tasia blurts out everything to her readers anyway. Louise, the therapist, has one of the loveliest names in the world, but she doesn’t seem to be very good at her job. The idea of making therapy sessions into an important part of the story is an interesting one, but, if the therapist is doing his or her job right, it’s almost always going to be an impersonal relationship: not someone the character or the reader can make any real connection to. If there is going to be something deeper than usual between them, we need to see it in their interactions. It has to be clear that the therapist, as a real character, is affected by their relationship in some way. An impersonal sounding board might be very helpful for people in real life, but it falls a bit flat in a story. If a character is going to come to some pretty huge revelations, it’s best if there’s an element of drama about it. A person who sits there calmly and asks questions isn’t really dramatic. And once you’ve sat through a certain amount of therapy sessions where nothing has really happened, it just gets boring.

Forbidden Places (Penny Vincenzi)*****

2009-09-26T18:50:00.003+01:00

The first Penny Vincenzi book I read, An Absolute Scandal, was an absolute struggle. There were just too many characters for me to keep up with them all. At least fifteen with their own storylines, all of them having similar experiences with subtle differences. But the writing was excellent, and Blue was one of the most gorgeous men who ever existed in fiction. So I thought Forbidden Places, with its much shorter Dramatis Personnae, was worth a try.

I’m so glad I read it. Once again, the protagonists have similar experiences, but there are really only four of them to keep up with, and one of them is killed off halfway through. This is very sad, of course, but it makes things easie, and it paves the way for something really sweet so I forgive Vincenzi for that. There's so much to enjoy: the writing, the story, the characters, and especially Ben. Blue has officially been surpassed in my affections, something which I never thought would happen. Ben is sweet, emotional, a bit pathetic, very kind, and very thoughtful. I just wanted to tear him out of the book, and marry him immediately. But I don’t think he’d like it if I did that. He’s too committed to everything and everyone I’d be making him leave behind. Come to think of it, my boyfriend might be a bit pissed off too.

Now I’ve just got to read the rest of Vincenzi’s books. If each of them has a character as half as wonderful as Ben and Blue, I know it’s going to be worth reading every word of the 900 pages.

Vincenzi has also created some great female characters. I absolutely adore the tactless Florence. I think she might be slightly autistic, as she is always offending people, apparently by accident. I think she’s actually really nice and although I understood why people were offended, most of what she said wouldn’t offend me. Then there’s Clarissa, who is very sexy, raunchy and naughty and undeniably a bit of a slut, but she’s so brave and funny and affectionate and loving to everyone, it’s very difficult not to love her. Linda is feisty, sexy, and rather witty. She wouldn’t take any crap off anyone, but she has a gentle side. She’s someone who would very easily fit into the world now.

The main character, Grace, is slightly more of a problem. She can be the nicest person in the world. She’s very kind to Ben when he shows up at her house unexpectedly and very distraught. She probably did do rather well to put up with all Florence’s insults when Florence was giving birth to Imogen, but I think a lot of women in labour get a bit like that. Grace is very tolerant of her unreasonable husband Charles and the way his family and friends treat her, and she’s very brave and determined during the challenges of the Second World War.

But she does seem to spend a lot of time hating people. Most of the time, it’s clear why she might be a little bit annoyed, but sometimes she really seems to be going completely over the top. She quite rightly finds the class structure a bit unfair – she marries the upper-class Charles, but is probably only middle class herself and a lot of people look down on her. But Grace has a horrible habit of thinking she’s superior to other people, and most of the time, she’s not. She can be extremely nosy and interfering, and she’s very lucky most of the people in the book end up liking her. Grace’s sweetness makes up for a lot.

But she hits two people. Yes, one of them had behaved badly (if in very difficult circumstances), and the other was being a pompous twat (and I can understand why Grace might think about hitting him), but it just didn’t seem right. If she’d hit the wanker who attacked her, I would have applauded her (even though that’s a bit dodgy too), but she doesn’t. The violence is partly a shock because Grace’s behaviour is usually very gentle, so it seemed very out of character. But it also puts her quite severely into the wrong where she had been in the right, and that was disappointing. There is no need for Grace to be perfect, but I don’t think she needs to be violent.

In some ways, Forbidden Places is a violent book. Most of the men in the book go away to fight in the war, and come back injured. Some of it is quite horrible to read about, but it’s very compellingly written. It’s an inspiring book in some ways because all the characters have to be brave in all kinds of circumstances, yet there is a slight distancing effect because things such as the class structure don’t really belong to our world now. But all the emotions experienced by the characters are very real, and Vincenzi explains the realities of the situation in a thoroughly informative way without taking you away from the story.

The book tells the story of the war, but also the story of people making mistakes but making the best of horrible situations, and working towards being happy. I suppose all books are like that really. But this one hits you hard.

The Undonestic Goddess (Sophie Kinsella)*****

2009-09-25T20:03:00.003+01:00

I’m not interested in the law and I’m not interested in cooking. So how come a book that has so much of both in it is one of the best books I’ve ever read? It’s probably because Sophie Kinsella can make anything interesting. After all, all the other books of hers I’ve read were all about shopping.

The Undomestic Goddess isn’t about the loveable Becky Bloomwood/Brandon in the Shopaholic series, but the equally alliterative Samantha Sweeting is no less adorable. Samantha is amazingly clever – she’s a hotshot lawyer who can do maths in her head (I can barely do it on paper, you should have seen what a mess I get in adding up the values of my fantasy football players) with an IQ of 158 (mine usually comes out a bit higher, but I probably added that up wrong too). Samantha could probably draw up legal contracts in her sleep (if she had time to sleep), and now she has the opportunity to become a senior partner, despite being only twenty-nine.

But Samantha can’t cook, or clean, or make beds – which turns out to be a bit of a problem when she suddenly finds herself working as a housekeeper in the middle of nowhere.

It sounds mad, but Kinsella can make anything seem perfectly reasonable. Whether she’s describing the legal world or housekeeping, everything seems realistic. Of course, as I don’t actually know anything about the legal world or housekeeping, I might not notice if there was something wrong with it. But a lot of books about specialist subjects can be completely unconvincing even when I don’t know anything about the subject.

The events that lead Samantha to abandon her highly-paid job and jump on the nearest train are surprisingly convincing. Her sudden jump from being cool and competent to horror-struck seems completely natural. Some people (like me) might have trouble identifying with a highly intelligent workaholic for the first chapter or so of the book, but stick with it. The shocked, appalled Samantha is much easier to relate to.

Her decision to become housekeeper to the delightfully bonkers couple Trish and Eddie requires some salt-pinching, and I personally was very uncomfortable at times with the fact that Samantha got the job under false pretences, and told some very elaborate lies. But it’s easy to forget about that because the book is so much fun. Samantha is convincingly intelligent - I have no trouble believing she has a first-class degree from Cambridge (contrast this with GP Katie in How to be Good who probably isn’t intelligent enough to write her name). I also have no trouble believing that a lawyer might not be able to cook. If you had a schedule like Samantha’s, you would never find the time either. (I don’t have a schedule like Samantha’s and I haven’t found the time to learn to cook, even though I have cooking GCSE. But I did cook my boyfriend a Welsh dinner for Valentine’s Day and he hasn’t died yet.)

Unfortunately, Samantha’s love interest isn’t nearly as gorgeous as Becky’s Luke – but perhaps I’d feel that way about anyone unfortunate enough to be called Nathaniel (if there are any nice Nathaniels out there, I’m sure I’d change my mind if I happened to meet you. Why couldn’t he have a nice name like Gareth? I don’t think I’ve ever read a book about a sexy guy called Gareth.) Nathaniel is an okay sort of guy. He’s just rather overshadowed by Samantha. They’re a good couple, but not a double act.

But the thing that really annoyed me was when Trish and Eddie found out Samantha could do sums in her head, and Trish thought she might be autistic. I didn’t find this very amusing, and I don’t understand why it would be so scandalous if Samantha did turn out to be autistic. It doesn’t make her a bad person. And I’m autistic and I definitely can’t do sums in my head. I wish I could. Then maybe I’d give people the right money when I buy things.

But it’s very rare for Kinsella to make a joke I don’t appreciate. And when she does, it’s probably says more about me than her. But I do appreciate some jokes that are aimed at people like me. I think viola jokes are hilarious. Not that I’m saying I am a viola, I’d never be that self-critical. I just play one.

Two's Company (Jill Mansell)****

2009-09-21T18:47:00.003+01:00

Two’s Company follows a celebrity family (don’t worry, they’re nothing like the Osbournes, they’re all interesting and talented people) and their numerous partners. Parents Jack and Cass have a very strong marriage that suddenly falls apart as soon as Jack meets tarty journalist Imogen. Their son Sean manages to impregnate a girl he doesn’t actually care about (well, one of the many girls he doesn’t care about) while their elder daughter Cleo (a model but quite an intelligent one) insists she’s not going to fall in love, but isn’t going to let that stop her from having fun. Their youngest daughter Sophie, by contrast, goes through the whole book without having sex once - the only men she’s interested in are the ones dying from AIDS in Africa - although she does develop a slight affection for an escaped prisoner.

It actually sounds like unoriginal trash when I put it like that – and perhaps it is. But it’s a lot of fun. The clichés are amazingly funny, and Sophie is the only major character in the large cast who doesn’t come over strongly and amusingly (too many archaeological digs and not enough character development, but she’s an isolated incident). Cass is lovely, and it’s completely understandable why all the men want to drop their trousers at the sight of her. Jack is inadequate in a surprisingly likeable way, he usually means well and he copes with Imogen admirably in the end – although I have to say I’d have admired him even more if he hadn’t got involved with her in the first place. Sean is much more of a lad than his father but even he turns out to be quite a sympathetic character because he’s so totally useless you just have to pity the poor boy - although perhaps not as much as you pity his sweet girlfriend Pandora, who has enough to worry about with that Christian name.

The bits on the side are also rather nicely done. The fact that Sean’s girlfriends don’t have a lot of character only makes it funnier, as personality clearly isn’t that important to him. Cleo meets all manner of men in her quest not to fall in love and Imogen is a pathetic bitch who is unintentionally funny. One thing I love about this book is that the celebrity status of the characters is treated quite matter-of-factly, and Mansell certainly doesn’t try to suggest that they’re any more perfect than – and certainly not that different from - their non-celebrity friends.

The only thing that really disappointed me about this book – apart from Sophie, what a waste of a lovely name – was that so much of their lives was glossed over. The book probably covers around three years, but there are long gaps where the characters change and move on, and that was a shame as I’d really have liked to know what happened to the characters in that time. At one point, Pandora’s baby jumps from being not much more than newborn to being sixteen months old – and so much must have happened in this time, not only with Pandora and Sean, but also with Cass, who has just started sleeping with her old friend Rory – and then suddenly they’ve been together for more than a year.

The book is 438 pages long, so it’s not short, but I could imagine it being twice as long and even more riveting. It could probably be stretched to the length of Penny Vincenzi’s An Absolute Scandal, which spans around two years. Long books can sometimes be a bit of a slog, but Two’s Company goes too quickly, and Mansell’s wonderful gift for comedy probably couldn’t make any book seem slow. (There was no need for the very minor character Donna to throw up into someone’s makeup box but that was about the only joke I didn’t appreciate. Pandora, with her morning sickness and appendicitis, I will forgive.)

Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)*****

2009-09-20T17:42:00.001+01:00

I’m quite tempted to give this review just two words – ‘read’ and ‘it’. But that would be a bit of a rubbish review, and I’m not sure this book would appeal to most people - although in theory it wouldn’t appeal to me, and I loved it. It is extremely sentimental, and there’s lots of discussion of things I’d usually not want to read about like bottom-wiping. But it was easy to make an exception for Tuesdays with Morrie.

It’s a true story about Mitch Albom and his old college professor, Morrie Schwarz. They were good friends at college, but then they lost touch. Then Mitch hears on the news that Morrie is dying, and he goes to see him, and the two become friends all over again.

Morrie is a lovely, wonderful, amazing, inspiring man, and it’s easy to see why Mitch loves him so much. It’s almost a romantic book. There’s never any suggestion of sex, but there’s a very strong closeness between the characters. Morrie teaches Mitch about life and death, and they clearly see themselves as teacher and student, as it was when they were at college. Yet at the same time, as Morrie’s illness takes hold, he needs more and more help from the people around him, including Mitch. That would usually seem almost like a parent and child relationship, with Mitch as the parent. But it’s not.

I’m not going to say this is a life-changing book. That’s just a total cliché, and I imagine the books that have changed people’s lives are probably completely different books for each person. And, much as I’d like to say it has, Tuesdays with Morrie hasn’t really changed my life. Even though Morrie has some wonderful things to say about the world that made me feel as though I ought to appreciate it a lot more, it’s not a feeling that’s going to last. I’m too lazy and self-obsessed.

But in a way this book has changed my life because it is a book I think about a lot. I think about Morrie and Mitch, and about how lucky they were to know each other, both because they’re really lovely people and because they had such a special relationship. Mitch makes it very clear how much he loves Morrie, but he also makes it clear he’s pretty wonderful himself, although without giving the impression that he knows it. It’s really heartening – and amazing - to know that people like Morrie existed in the world. Maybe there are more people like that: Mitch Albom could certainly be one of them. Maybe there are also people who could learn to be like that.

This book might well have been published whether Albom could write or not – Morrie’s story was featured on national television, and it seems as though he became a bit of a celebrity. But Albom is a brilliant writer. I haven’t read any of his other books, so I’m not that sure what he’s like as a writer of fiction, but Tuesdays with Morrie is wonderfully written. Albom’s writing style is quite simple, but he puts a lot across in few words.

There was a small example of what I presume to be Albom’s fiction at the end of the book. I didn’t enjoy it, as I felt it was completely inappropriate that there should be a completely different story to read after Morrie’s story had come to an end. Maybe I should have stopped reading, but I wanted to know if there was some connection between this and the main story – I wanted to read more about Morrie! There didn’t seem to be any connection, but Tuesdays with Morrie is the sort of book that can leave you stunned. I probably wasn’t in the right state of mind for working out what a new story might mean.

I finished reading Tuesdays with Morrie on a Tuesday. I like coincidences like that.

How to Be Good (Nick Hornby)**

2009-09-19T20:43:00.002+01:00

Nick Hornby is a brilliant writer. I enjoyed High Fidelity and About a Boy, and Fever Pitch is probably one of the greatest books ever written and I’m not just saying that because I support Arsenal. Supporters of other teams love it too. Even people who hate football enjoy it. And, as Fever Pitch is pretty much all about football, I think that’s a pretty strong sign that Hornby is an excellent writer.

This only made How to be Good even more disappointing. The protagonist, Katie, is a stupid bitch (yet another of these characters who are supposed to be doctors, but don’t seem to be intelligent enough to graduate from primary school), and her husband David is just annoying. Not quite annoying enough to make Katie’s nastiness reasonable, but annoying enough to make me want to stop reading about him. I didn’t stop, I stuck with this to the end, and it was a total waste of time. The only reason why Hornby merits a second star is because some of the descriptive passages are extremely well done. It’s the plot, characters and dialogue that are the problem.

The plot idea is very interesting at first glance. Katie has just started an affair because her husband is so horrible to her (not nearly as horrible as she is to him, but never mind that for the moment). Her husband is on the point of throwing her out (if I were him I’d be delighted to have such a good excuse for getting rid of her) but then he goes to see a man called GoodNews who has the gift of healing. GoodNews at first heals David’s backache, then he heals his mind. From that moment on, David is nice. He blames himself for the affair, and does all he can to make Katie happy.

Some of his attempts are amusing, it has to be said. And I suppose it is not unrealistic that Katie, after years of wishing her husband would be nice to her, discovers it’s not what she wants after all. But I do wish she’d appreciated it to begin with, and tried a bit harder to go on appreciating it. He’s trying to be nice, for God’s sake. She goes on all the time about how miserable David is, but she’s actually a lot worse.

One problem with a plot like this is you have to wonder, where’s it all going to go from here? Theoretically, there’s no reason why GoodNews can’t cure everyone in the world and make it a happier place. But once you’ve changed the whole world, how is the book going to end? ‘And they all lived happily ever after’? Fortunately, Hornby doesn’t take this route, but then he doesn’t really take any route at all. The story just meanders on and on, Katie becomes more and more annoying, until suddenly – to my great relief – the book comes to an end.

I hate the way Katie keeps saying ‘I’m a good person, I’m a doctor’. Okay, she’s not strictly a bad person. She doesn’t kill anyone. But neither she nor the new, nice David consider for a moment that some of the problems between them might have been her fault. Even if she had been a nice person, she’s unlikely to be blameless. No-one ever really seems to realise this.

Hornby is still one of my favourite writers ever though. Without him, I might not have ended up supporting Arsenal. I might have stayed supporting Millwall like my dad – who is certainly not one of those Millwall thugs you read about, but his football team seldom makes him happy. Millwall got into the play-offs last season, but he was miserable because they only finished fifth instead of third. But I can talk, the prospect of Arsenal’s qualifying for the Europa League instead of the Champions’ League fills me with dread. And probably Hornby too.

A Married Man (Catherine Alliott)****

2009-03-15T17:48:00.002Z

I’ve been out with married men. It’s definitely something to be avoided in theory but marriage just isn’t something men tend to mention on the first date. By the time they do mention it, I’m usually fed up with them anyway, so it’s a good reason for getting rid of them (and a much kinder one than ‘you’re boring me to death and I’d rather die than sleep with you’). But what if you actually like the married guy? Giving up someone you like isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Carole Matthews, in Let’s Meet on Platform 8, didn’t quite manage to keep my sympathies with all corners of her love triangle. Catherine Alliott has the same trouble. But it’s not every book that can alternate effectively between hysterical humour and devastating tragedy. A Married Man somehow manages it.

The ‘affair’ begins as a quite worrying case of stalking, but it’s easy to see how it started out. Lucy (yes another Lucy) is still grieving the loss of her husband Ned after four years, and really wants to move on - unfortunately there’s a very prevalent attitude in the world that you can’t be happy unless you’re in a relationship. This view is not only completely wrong, it’s potentially very damaging both for people who aren’t in relationships and for people who would rather be treated disgustingly by a boy/girlfriend than be single. But people get sucked into it all the same.

So perhaps it’s not very surprising when Lucy starts to feel a bit desperate, and develops a crush on a guy called Charlie whom she sees at the shops. But within a few pages, it’s become very worrying: she’s following him into shops; asking people about him under the pretence of being a friend of his; even accepting her dreaded mother-in-law Rose’s offer to go and live with her because she doesn’t live far from Charlie.

The comedy lapses a bit at that point. Lucy’s infatuation isn’t funny at all. It’s almost a relief when it turns out Charlie likes her too – at least that means he’s less likely to take out a restraining order. But another problem with the book is that I don’t know what Lucy sees in Charlie. He’s a bit creepy. So are lots of the men in this book. Out of all of them, I wanted Lucy to end up with Ned’s womanising cousin Jack as he seems by far the least dodgy (apart from the lovely gay couple, Theo and Ray, but you couldn’t split them up!).

The women, by contrast, are extremely well-characterised. Rose is terrifying, even in comparison with other mother-in-laws. Then there’s Charlie’s daughter Ellen, who might just grow up to be just like Rose; Lucy’s wonderful friends, Teresa, Jess and Rozanna (the latter one of the most remarkable creations in chick lit fiction – ‘tart with a heart’ doesn’t cover it) and her scarily competent new friend Mimsy. Poor Lucy goes from one scrape to another, and the more clichéd the situations are, the funnier Alliott somehow manages to make them.

Yet the book has a very serious side as well. It deals with bereavement for a start, not to mention obsessive behaviour. After the frivolity of much of the book, these sections are very powerful and moving. Alliott switches from one to the other with great effectiveness – actually, ‘switch’ is the wrong word because the changes are far more subtle than that. Just when you were rolling on the floor with laughter – BAM. And it works every time.

A Married Man might be frothy in places, but it’s a much more cleverly constructed book than it seems. It’s a book to make you think – not something you’d usually say about chick lit at all – and well worth a read, even if Catherine Alliott isn’t usually your kind of thing. I loved Alliott’s A Crowded Marriage, but whilst the two books have their similarities, this is on a completely different level.

Amy - Fairy Kisses

2009-03-08T23:02:00.002Z

Hi Amy, if you see this I just want to say I can't view your blog. Every time I click on a post it says This blog doesn't exist. Maybe you've blocked me, I can't blame for you that as I can be quite annoying but I hope you're okay. xx

No Dress Rehearsal (Marian Keyes)**

2009-03-08T22:53:00.003Z

I love Marian Keyes. I do. And she can write about death very well. No Dress Rehearsal was another great idea, but it kind of fell a bit flat, and I was left wondering what the point of it was.

The very short book – just seventy-nine pages long - tells the story of Lizzie, who dies in an accident but fails to realise she’s dead. When her partner ignores her, she assumes it was because of the row they had the morning before she died, but being ignored by everyone else seems inexplicable – until two people show up in her office, and tell her she’s dead.

It’s a great idea. I’ve read about people not realising they’re dead, but never from the point of view of the dead person.

But the book doesn’t work for me. One thing I have said about Keyes’ longer novels is that it often takes me several chapters in order to get into the story. Rachel in Rachel’s Holiday is a pretty horrible person to begin with, so it took me quite a while to learn to like her. Probably more than seventy-nine pages. I had a similar problem with Lizzie - she just didn’t seem terribly nice. As the book was so short, I didn’t really have time to get to know her. Some parts of the book were told from the point of view of Lizzie’s friend, Sinead. But I didn’t really like her either. She was okay, but a bit of a doormat, and her storyline didn’t interest me very much – it wasn’t nearly as original as Lizzie’s.

The book is, of course, wonderfully written, and there was a bit of humour – more than you’d expect from a book with a death theme, although anyone wanting to see bereavement and comedy put together effectively might prefer to read Catherine Alliott’s A Married Man.

But No Dress Rehrearsal just didn’t quite work. Not for me, anyway. This is possibly because it is aimed at adults who have trouble reading - but I would say an adult who has trouble reading needs a good book a lot more than I do. I'm not going to give up on reading because one book (okay, more than one!) disappointed me. This book could be making people decide whether they take up reading or not. Reading can probably enhance everyone's lives if they find the right book - so a book like No Dress Rehearsal really needs to be good. But then I am the fussiest person in the world, so maybe this book works really well!

The House at Riverton (Kate Morton)****

2009-03-01T16:16:00.002Z

You know the main climax of The House at Riverton just from reading the blurb.

But don’t let that put you off. The blurb actually tells you very little, and, in giving up before you’ve read the book, you’d miss so much.

The story is complex and fascinating. Housemaid Grace joins the staff at Riverton, and forms a bond with the two daughters of the house, Hannah and Emmeline. The story is told from Grace’s point of view, and spans almost a century, as Grace rises from lowly housemaid to lady’s maid to becoming a lady in her own right. It shows how the Victorian world was suddenly transformed into one shockingly close to the world of today, with love affairs, sex outside marriage, and even nightclubs.

Kate Morton writes beautifully, describing the actions, the characters and Grace’s surroundings all in lovely, lyrical prose. Unusually, the protagonist, Grace, doesn’t have much of an effect on the action. Her job requires her to be silent, and to observe. Mostly, the action focuses on Hannah and Emmeline, and Grace does little more than witness it. Yet she seems a very vibrant character despite all this. She responds to everything. She observes everything in an non-judgemental way, just accepting everything that happens, but her feelings of interest; of care for the characters make her into a big and important character. Morton could easily have told the story without Grace, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as fascinating.

This is partly because Grace is such an interesting character, but also because no-one else could really have told the story. Emmeline is important, but absent for much of it. Much of the story hinges on what she doesn’t know.

Hannah is also a great character, but part of her allure is in her mystery. Grace can never know Hannah completely because, of course, there is a limit to what Hannah will tell a servant, even one for whom she develops some fondness. But part of the fascination with Hannah is that she’s so unpredictable. You never know what she will do in any given situation. Had the story been told from Hannah’s point of view, we would probably have seen a lot more of the reasoning behind Hannah’s decisions, and that would probably have made her more predictable and consequently less interesting.

There is also a ‘framing’ storyline set in modern times, where a film is made about Hannah and Emmeline’s life. Grace, now ninety-eight, meets the producer and other people involved in the film, including the young actress who is to play the role of Grace (somewhat cheekily named Keira). We also see Grace’s relationships with her daughter, her grandson, and Sylvia, who looks after her in the retirement home. There is not a great deal of story set in the present, but there is so much to hold your interest.

But there are times when the book drags a bit. There are sections where not a lot happens, and I’d have preferred it if these sections were either cut completely (it’s a very long book as it is) or for them to be replaced by something that helps one or more of the storylines along.

Also, the final climax has weaknesses. While Morton builds up to this moment very effectively, and there is (most of the time) far too much going on for you to be waiting impatiently for that part of the book to happen (if I read about something in the blurb that sounds good, I often want it to happen RIGHT NOW). But the climax is indirectly caused by one particular incident in the book that seemed a bit weak and desultory when it happens, and certainly doesn’t really need to be dragged on for years. I’m not going into detail though because I don’t want to put people off. It’s disappointing, considering what Morton has achieved in this novel, but it’s no reason to give the book a miss.

The House at Riverton isn’t perfect all the way through, but the good bits are amazing, and I haven’t read another book like it.

Human Croquet (Kate Atkinson)**

2009-02-17T17:58:00.002Z

There’s nothing wrong with books about time travel. It can be really compelling. But there has got to be a point to it. For one thing, books with a point are a lot more satisfactory than those that are vague, meandering and often incomprehensible. For another, the fact that characters can travel through time is not enough, on its own, to make a book exciting. It’s hardly a new idea.

Human Croquet does have some good points. Kate Atkinson’s prose can be very lyrical – yes, parts of it are ludicrously overwritten, but some of the images she creates are beautiful. Even the ones that seem totally irrelevant.

Atkinson is also very good at character. The main characters, Isobel, Charles, Gordon and Debbie are all very distinctive, and there is something quite endearing about them, even if they’re not strictly likeable. Isobel is verging on insanity, which is a bit of a problem when she keeps claiming to be the sanest person in the house, but they’re basically okay, in a weird sort of way.

Then there is Eliza – a genuinely creepy and intriguing character who speaks in italics instead of speech marks, and is unlike anyone I ever remember reading about before. I was quite disappointed when Atkinson explained her origins at the end. Eliza’s backstory was the one part of the book where the vagueness actually worked. Eliza really deserved a better book – or at least a different book. It’s possible she would be even more powerful if the other characters in the book were a bit more typical.

But the story is a major problem. The only reason I finished it is because I like writing reviews, and I think it’s a bit of a cheat to write them when you haven’t read the whole book. One of the big problems with Human Croquet is something I shouldn’t really give away to future readers, but as I’m not recommending this book to anyone, maybe it doesn’t matter. But anyway, if you don’t want to know this, stop reading now. I hate it when characters wake up and discover something was all a dream. Plot devices like that are fine when you’re in Year 3 and it seems quite clever, but in an adult author it is unforgiveable unless you’ve got a very good reason. It’s weak, it’s a cop-out, and it’s effectively telling you to discount that huge chunk of book you’ve just struggled through as it isn’t real. So why did you make us read it?????

Rachel's Holiday (Marian Keyes)*****

2009-01-24T20:04:00.002Z

I didn’t like Rachel’s Holiday at all until I was quite a way into it, but I loved it by the end. A lot of people talk about Marian Keyes’ humour and warmth and great characters, and all those things are demonstrated in this book. But one of the things I really like about books like Rachel’s Holiday, Watermelon and Anybody Out There is that Keyes is not afraid to create heroines that some people might find difficult to empathise with. And maybe the fact that Angels, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married and particularly No Dress Rehearsal left me cold could be more of a sign of my failure to appreciate such an imperfect heroine than Keyes’ inability to work a miracle every time.

With Rachel’s Holiday, Keyes takes risks. Rachel is a horrible person. I have no real problems with the fact that she’s a drug addict. That in itself doesn’t make her a bad person, although most of her undesirable personality traits are probably related to her dependence on drugs. But I’ve met some drug addicts who are very nice, and there are also plenty of nice drug addicts in this book.

But Rachel is a bit of a bitch. She’s also a total slag. And most of the worst things about her, you don’t even know about until the book’s half-over. She’s smug and superior and shallow. It does seem a bit harsh in the beginning when her family packs her off to rehab. After all, the book is told from Rachel’s point of view, so it’s quite easy to believe her when she says she’s not an addict. In retrospect, I admire her for emptying her valium tablets down the toilet. That can’t have been easy.

I didn’t like Rachel at all, but drugs can affect your personality, so I was prepared to give her a chance - and not stop reading in disgust. And I ended up enjoying the book a lot. I don’t know how realistic it is, and I’m sure that rehabilitation, like counselling, is a very individual thing, and different people will respond differently to the many different approaches. But it was easy to believe that the approach used on Rachel was one that would have an effect on her.

The other characters are great. One good thing about landing your heroine in rehab is that you can put just about any character you like in your story, and it doesn’t matter that Rachel wouldn’t normally hang around with them. Trapping a group of strong and mismatched characters together can be really funny. And also really touching, when you see them learning to get along despite everything. Look at all those comedies set on a desert island. Look at Big Brother. Keyes has filled her desert island with some wonderful characters, and they all have believable stories. She’s also not afraid to make fun of psychiatrists a bit. And quite right too. Most psychiatrists are madder than their patients.

So it’s worth a read – but you need a bit of patience. Rachel has good qualities if you can find them, and the book is full of humour and great characters. And while the ending might be predictable, the twists and turns are not.

Sophie's World (Jorsten Gardner)****

2009-01-18T16:01:00.003Z

If you’re interested in philosophy, this book is great. Even if you’re not interested in philosophy, you could end up loving it. I used to think philosophy was a bit of a stupid and pointless subject (although this isn’t something I’ve said in front of my six-foot tall philosophy graduate sister) but I ended up really enjoying the philosophic aspect of the book.

However, if you’re just after a good story, you probably shouldn’t waste your time. The basic story is quite weak. It’s all about how Sophie gets messages from a mysterious philosopher called Alberto, and a lot of the book is just her reading about philosophy. Later on, the book turns into conversations about philosophy, but it’s still a bit disappointing as a story. Not a lot happens. The most dramatic thing that happens is probably the fact that Sophie is stupid enough to creep out in the middle of the night to meet a middle-aged man she’s never seen before.

The characters, it has to be said, aren’t that strong. Only the philosophers come over well, and apart from Alberto, they’re not original personalities. Alberto is an intriguing character, and someone I wouldn’t mind meeting (although he’d better not start inviting me out to churches in the middle of the night) but he seems rather emotionless. He is fascinated by the world, but apparently emotionally unaffected by it, and it’s quite difficult to identify with characters like that.

Sophie is okay until she comes under Alberto’s influence. She starts the book as a slightly odd but harmless and very nice teenage girl. But then she develops an inflated sense of her own superiority that is very unattractive. It’s probably not her fault. She’s at an impressionable age, and Alberto’s philosophical writings do say it is better to be curious about the world than to accept it, so it’s understandable really that Sophie has come to the conclusion that being curious makes her a better person than those who aren’t curious.

But one of the main aims of philosophy is to see the wonder in the world, and I think, rather than looking down at her fellow human beings, she should look for the wonder in them instead. It’s true that most people don’t appreciate philosophy, but that doesn’t mean they have no good qualities at all, and that you can’t admire them and be inspired by them. Sophie’s friend Joanna has little character, but she does seem to be genuinely kind and forgiving, and I find that more wonderful than intellectual curiosity.

But the natural world is pretty amazing too. Alberto got that part right.

Sophie’s World is a very challenging book. The story doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve taken in the philosophy lectures, and that can be quite time-consuming. It took me weeks to read this book, and that’s something that only usually happens if I a) hate the book so much, I can hardly bear to pick it up (like Jane Green’s Second Chances) or b) love the book so much, I want to savour every chapter (like Gareth Southgate and Andy Woodman’s Woody and Nord: A Football Friendship). Sophie’s World was c) a bit like reading a text book, so I needed to take in only a couple of ideas at a time.

In many ways, it is a text book. The philosophical writing is of a significantly higher standard than the story. You can’t really move on to the next section until you’ve understood the one before – well, you can, but the story isn’t very engaging when you’re just reading it blindly thinking, what the fuck is that Alberto going on about now? I like to try to guess what’s going to happen in books, and to work things out, and if that means I have to study philosophy, I will study it.

But I have to ask – how useful is the book for philosophy students, really? Jorsten Gardner wrote the book to help philosophy students, but my sister couldn’t read it. She’s not really a fiction person. So, to read Sophie’s Choice, an interest in philosophy is essential but it’s not enough. You probably also need to enjoy reading fiction and have the determination to get through a difficult book. Yet you also have to put up with some pretty crap writing, which a lot of people who love reading aren’t prepared to do.

Some of the problem could be in the translation – the fact that Sophie’s hair changes from fair to dark within the first few pages (no mention of hair-dye) shows something has gone wrong. It’s possible that the clunky and clumsily constructed fiction sections are a result of poor translation.

But there seems to have been only one translator, and the philosophy sections are beautifully written and constructed (which really was a great help when it came to making sense of everything). So what I think is (although the translator is undeniably a bit careless), Gardner is a really great non-fiction writer who knows philosophy very well, and is very good at explaining it to others – but he’s not a natural fiction writer and can’t cope with the complications of conversational syntax.

So, Sophie’s World probably would have been a more accessible book if he’d worked with a fiction writer who was more experienced in the delineation of plot and character. But it’s pretty successful as it is. Gardner does a more than reasonable job with a very difficult and challenging subject. What Gardner has achieved is more remarkable than his shortcomings, if you think about it.

Watermelon (Marian Keyes)*****

2009-01-13T16:17:00.003Z

This is the first book about the delightful Walsh family. While it isn’t quite as original as Anybody Out There, it is still an amazing book, and a lot of fun. Claire, the oldest of the five sisters, is witty and sparky with a wonderfully macabre sense of humour. It’s not easy to create a character who is humorous yet miserable. But Marian Keyes has done it.

Claire is very immature for twenty-nine. I don’t think I know anyone who is less mature than me, and one of my friends is eleven. But Claire is definitely more immature than me. She is also quite vulnerable and unsure of herself, but at the same time, she is very socially confident. Extremely friendly, but extremely miserable. Yet you never feel, Oh for God’s sake, woman, it’s not that bad.

It’s not as though Claire has no reason to feel unsure of herself. Just hours after the birth of her daughter, her husband James tells her he’s leaving her for their neighbour, Denise. Of course, Claire was very stupid to marry someone called James in the first place. We all know what fictional Jameses are like. But, as Claire seems to be completely unaware that she is no more than a product of Keyes’ imagination, and has no real life outside the pages of Watermelon and its sequels, it’s an understandable mistake.

Her family are all here apart from Maggie, the most disappointing of the sisters and the heroine of Angels. The mysterious Rachel is also absent (the more I hear about her, the more I look forward to reading Rachel’s Holiday, considered by many to be Keyes’ best book). Anna (who stars in Anybody Out There) drifts around sweetly and vaguely in search of voices from the beyond. The youngest, Helen, is enchantingly ignorant of such things as the need for studying when at university; the fact that her sisters’ clothes do not also belong to her, and other people’s feelings. (OMG, apart from the clothes thing, she could be me.)

It’s a long book, almost five hundred pages, but well worth it. All Claire is doing is recovering from James’ defection and trying to come to terms with being a mother. But it’s gripping stuff. Apart from one small slow bit, there’s a real sense of pace. The fact that sexy, caring Adam seems to like her so much only improves things. Claire’s baby, Kate, is a surprisingly strong character. Claire interacts with her and learns to understand her feelings and needs. She isn’t the best mother in the world, but she’s undoubtedly trying, and her difficulties probably aren’t that unusual - even among mothers whose husbands haven’t run off with bitches called Denise.

Claire does appear to be suffering from schizophrenia, but it’s so hilariously written, it’s difficult to feel seriously worried about it. She not only has conversations with parts of her brain, she has security guards running around trying to throw out unwelcome thoughts. But that doesn’t matter. Why should it? It should only be a problem if the voices are telling you something bad. And the voices (and security guards) in Claire’s head often make a lot more sense than she does. We should all get some of those.

Let's Meet on Platform 8 (Carole Matthews)***

2009-01-11T14:21:00.003Z

I don’t always like stories with stations in. They so seldom seem anything like the real thing. When I read about a station I know well, I often think: this isn’t the Euston/Leicester Square/Barbican I know.

But Carole Matthews gets it right. Her Euston is my Euston. I didn’t know about the pub above the concourse, but it was right where she said it was when I actually looked up. The stations are wonderfully described. Euston, Watford Junction, Leighton Buzzard… I’ve been to those places. It’s so nice to read a book and recognise the stations I know and love and even talk to sometimes... (although maybe I shouldn’t admit to that part).

However, I was a bit surprised to hear that Jamie takes the Northern Line from Euston to Leicester Square, then changes onto the Piccadilly Line to Covent Garden. Doesn’t he know they are ‘officially’ the two closest stations on the Underground network (although Charing Cross and Embankment on the Northern Line are the closest really)? Unless there’s a train actually sitting in the Piccadilly Line platform at Leicester Square when you get there, it’s quicker to walk. And if he does walk, he might be able to avoid the Covent Garden crowds he was moaning about.

But Jamie is a bit of an idiot. If he wasn’t, there wouldn’t be a story at all.

It’s a shame about the characters, really. It starts wonderfully, with Jamie running into Teri (literally) and knocking her over. He looks after her, and they end up chatting, and they really seem to get on well. But then, in a twist of Fate that never happens in Mills and Boon, it turns out Jamie is married. Well, he would be, wouldn’t he? Jamie is short for James! We know what they’re like. In fiction, anyway. See Lucy in the Sky, Holly’s Inbox, Watermelon and Got You Back if you don’t believe me. They’re worse than Matthews (characters called Matthew I mean, not the author of this book). Matthews might be okay if they weren’t so immature. Jamie is one of the nicest Jameses I’ve ever read about, but that doesn’t change the fact they can’t stay faithful to save their lives. (The fact that I’m not very good at being faithful either is irrelevant.)

Teri is nice to start off with, but then she gets a bit caught up in the affair, and she becomes a bit possessive. And seriously, I have no respect for anyone who answers the phone when they’re about to be sick. Obviously, I can see why speaking on the phone is infinitely more attractive as an option, but as far as I can see it, it’s not an option. Just go to the toilet, do what you have to do, then dial 1471 and call the person back. And don’t go into details of why you couldn’t answer the phone 5 minutes ago. Even a non-emetophobe probably won’t enjoy that sort of detail.

Okay? Now onto more pleasant subjects. Like adultery.

Let’s Meet on Platform 8 is a very brave story. There is a lot of adultery in fiction, but there are few novels where everyone involved – the adulterer, the spouse and the bit on the side – are all basically nice people. Usually, at least one of them is a clearly defined villain, and they are horrible in all sorts of other ways too (see A Crowded Marriage, Watermelon etc). So the adultery is a positive thing in that it frees up the heroine to find someone nice instead. Or in something like Getting Rid of Matthew, the guy might not strictly be a villain, but you don’t really want him to end up with either of his women because they both deserve better.

There’s no villain here. Jamie is probably correct when he tells Teri that his wife Pamela doesn’t understand him, but Pamela is still a nice and generally very understanding person – it just so happens her marriage needs a bit of work. Teri and Jamie are also lovely until they make the decision to turn friendly cups of coffee into a shagathon. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of flirtation: in this case, it’s very sweet. But there’s no need to bonk everyone you fancy. If I did that, I’d have no time to write book reviews and I’d probably be dead by now.

It’s easier to stay sympathetic to all parties here than in most books, but the book is still not completely successful. You really want to be torn between what Pamela wants; what Jamie wants; what Teri wants. Supporting one person one minute, then changing your mind; hoping it can somehow work out for everyone in a realistic and non-contrived sort of way. But it’s probably really difficult to write a book like this: Matthews does come pretty close. But if you want to read a Matthews book, read the Chocolate Lovers series. It’s not always realistic but it is nearly always funny.

Shopaholic Ties the Knot (Sophie Kinsella)*****

2009-01-07T20:06:00.002Z

I’m not jealous. I’m not jealous that Luke wants to marry Becky instead of me. After all, things could obviously be very different if he’d actually met me. But Becky is one of the sweetest, funniest, most likeable characters in fiction, so I can’t blame him for loving her at all.

This time, Becky isn’t fighting bankruptcy and has no concerns about Luke’s fidelity. Things are actually going very well for her: Luke has proposed. But there is one teeny tiny problem in that their mothers have completely different ideas about the wedding, and they’re not actually speaking to one another. And Becky somehow hasn’t quite got around to telling either of them she’s having another wedding planned on the other side of the Atlantic.

Luke is lovelier than ever. He has finally been reunited with his mother, who abandoned him when he was a baby. Now he’s rich, she’s actually paying him some attention. But he’s so caught up in the illusion of mother love, even dippy Becky has a better idea of what’s going on than he has. He spends a lot of the book feeling miserable and depressed, and generally being adorable. This gives Becky the opportunity to look after him for a change. And this doesn’t involve dragging him round the shops to cheer him up. Poor Luke: Sophie Kinsella really is a bit mean to him in this book. I just wanted to climb into the pages and give him a big hug.

The book is mostly set in New York, but Becky’s parents and neighbours still make a pretty big appearance, and we hear the latest in the long-running saga of Tom and Lucy, two characters who get an extraordinarily big storyline throughout the Shopaholic series despite barely appearing in person. (If Tom’s mother, Janice, is infuriating you to the extent that you want to rip out every page with her name on, don’t worry. It will pass.)

Kinsella’s Shopaholic books are wonderful, but they do have certain similarities in their plots. This time, while Becky is in no less of a mess than usual, Kinsella has done something a bit different. There’s a lot more to Becky than shops and a lot more to Luke than having a successful company, but this is the book that really makes you aware of it. I love all the Shopaholic books (even the first one, I suppose), but this one is my favourite.

The Devil Wears Prada (Lauren Weisberger)**

2009-01-03T20:20:00.004Z

I do like films, but I would usually they’re no substitute to reading the book. The book is usually better. But in this case, I would say, give the book a miss and watch the film.

Lauren Weisberger is very funny at times, and this is a more successful book than her rubbish second offering, Everyone Worth Knowing. Miranda Priestly is a brilliant character. But like all the characters, she is so much better in the film. In the book, Miranda is funny and scary, but the film takes this to new levels. As for the other characters, they don’t quite work in the book.

The film Andrea is a lovely character. Very kind to everyone, and she obviously feels terrible having to put her job before her friends, but she’s quite understandably much too scared of Miranda. Andrew also has a wonderful ignorance of fashion to begin with. She knows it’s not that important, but she respects the view of the people she works with, and manages to learn a lot during her time in the job.

The book Andrea doesn’t seem to care about anything apart from herself. She’s doing the job so she can have a future in the writing world, and nothing can get in her way. She rivals Miranda in rudeness stakes. She never loses an opportunity to bitch about Miranda, or to look down on her colleague, Emily. And she’s a dreadful assistant. Miranda is wrong to fire Andrea when she goes to hospital to see her friend who’s in a coma. But she should have fired her before for being lazy, insolent and disrespectful. It’s not clever to add ten minutes to your lunchbreak.

The film Emily is, in some ways, the person Andrea thinks she is in the book. Film-Emily can be a bit sneering and snobby. She does despair of Andrea’s ignorance. But you do kind of end up liking her because she’s not all bad, and she’s very entertaining. Book-Emily is amazingly nice and accommodating to Andrea, who is probably very difficult for Emily to work with – which is the last thing she needs when she already has Miranda to deal with. She covers for Andrea. She does all she can to help make her good at her job. I like her, but she’s a lot less interesting than the film Emily. (Emily in the film is played by a wonderful actress called Emily Blunt. I’ve never met her, but I’ve been in a play with her brother and sister.)

Weisberger has various subplots that I don’t think made it into the film, like Andrea’s alcoholic friend, Lily – she has a horrifying storyline but Andrea won’t help her even when she knows something is wrong. This storyline has no place in a comedy, and should have taken a much bigger place in a psychological drama.

The main story doesn’t have a plot at all. It just shows event after event in Andrea’s year in the job. Nothing really happens. She doesn’t really become any more efficient, unless devising more ways of breaking the rules counts. She doesn’t develop any great respect for her job. As in the film, her relationship falls apart, but the part you don’t understand in the book is why Alex (inexplicably renamed Nate in the film) puts up with the bitch for as long as he does.

The Devil Wears Prada is just a horrible book about a thoroughly nasty protagonist and the countless vomit scenes didn’t help. They’re always at it. Weisberger’s wit just about scrapes her into two-star territory, and, after all, if she hadn’t written the book, it wouldn’t have been made into a really great film.

And this Weisberger woman says I’m fat. I’m Size Zero (for health reasons, not by choice) and the stupid woman says I’m fat because I’m eight and a half stone... I'm Size Six, how is that fat? Weisberger is lucky I’m emetophobic because if I wasn’t I could be bulimic by now. Silly cow.

I did stay up late so I could finish this book, but only because I wanted to finish it and then start reading something else so I didn’t get nightmares. Instead, I had a dream where I had this boyfriend who was doing really well in a music competition, but then I found out his fluorescent pink saxophone was a fake with a tape recorder inside. It was weird, but a lot more fun than The Devil Wears Prada.

Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married (Marian Keyes)***

2009-01-01T17:37:00.003Z

Lucy Sullivan is nothing like a Lucy should be. I’ve got no problem with Marian Keyes breaking the traditions of naming – her Daniel isn’t much like a Daniel either – and besides, this book might have been written before the traditions were established. But if she had been more like a Lucy should be, the book might have worked a lot better.

This is a very funny book with some great characters and some really good twists. So I can completely understand why people love it. But for me the problem with the book is that Lucy isn’t a very nice person. She can be really nasty. Her mother obviously isn’t the nicest person in the world either, but it doesn’t mean Lucy should speak to her with such loathing and disrespect. Yes, Mrs Sullivan might deserve it, but Keyes really doesn’t go deeply enough into their relationship to make Lucy’s behaviour seem understandable, never mind acceptable.

To begin with, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married seems to be telling the story of three flatmates in search of love. We follow Lucy, stupid Charlotte, and the bossy, bitchy and wonderfully characterised Karen, a Scot who lives up to the stereotype of her nation beautifully. Lucy is supposed to be the nice one they can’t live without. She does deal with them both very tactfully for the most part, but that’s not enough to make me like her. Karen, not Lucy, is the one you like despite everything. Charlotte is the one you can’t help loving because she’s so sweet. Charlotte’s many imperfections slip your mind to the extent that you think she doesn’t have any.

Lucy is supposed to play a similar mediatory role with her three workmates. Keyes keeps on reminding us that Meredia is the obese one, and as the book is told from Lucy’s point of view, it’s one more reason to see Lucy as a bit of a bitch. There’s so much more to Meredia - a lovely, warm girl with an endearing enthusiasm for life – than her weight. Megan is an Australian bitch who is constantly at loggerheads with Meredia, but she doesn’t seem too much of a bully as Meredia can stand up for herself pretty well. It’s interesting that the two 'bitches', Megan and Karen, aren’t-English - although Keyes is Irish, and the Irish characters are even worse.

The book starts off as a perfectly acceptable comedy about finding – and keeping – a boyfriend. But then the story take a serious turn. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it would have been more effective if some darker overtones had been there from the start. It’s difficult when the genre suddenly changes halfway through. There’s a section where Lucy goes home to take care of her mentally unwell father. There’s definitely no comedy here, and nor should there be with a subject like this, and it’s probably the part of the book where Keyes’ writing is at its most vivid. But it doesn’t really have any place in what started off as a comedy. Keyes’ Anybody Out There combines comedy and tragedy really well, but it is a sad book with funny parts, and it stays that way throughout. Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married is a comedy that suddenly becomes a tragedy.

There are some great moments in this book. Like when Lucy does a runner in the middle of a date (the guy deserves it), and we get to see the guy’s reaction, in delicious detail. There’s the time Charlotte develops an interest in psychology. It’s also lovely when Meredia finds a guy. And it’s certainly a relief when Lucy finally meets her man – he’s not the greatest, but she gets no more than she deserves.

The Last to Know (Melissa Hill)**

2008-12-29T23:26:00.005Z

There’s nothing I hate more than a book about writers (apart from a book about projectile vomiting), and this book seems to have writers and writing all over the place. Brooke, a publisher in Australia, is reading a new manuscript, telling the story of Eve (who wants her partner Liam to marry her) her sister Sam (a famous writer who loves someone she can’t have) and Anna (who is pretending she’s not pregnant). And it’s not only Brooke who has to read all about them: we have to as well. And you know how I feel about books within a book.

The book is actually mostly about Eve and Sam, with just a chapter about Brooke here and there. Nothing really happens to Brooke except her reading the book, talking about what a great style the writer has, and then giving her opinions of the characters. Not only is this rather boring, it sounds rather as though Melissa Hill is congratulating herself on her own writing skills, and telling us what we have to think of the characters. Hill probably didn’t mean to do this at all though – and in order for her highly original story to work, it would have been difficult to avoid these pitfalls.

But I found the book very annoying. I hardly ever agreed with Brooke about the characters. Maybe most people would agree with her, but I think there are always going to be people with different views of fictional characters, just as there are going to be different views of real people.

I didn’t agree that Anna was cold. I thought she was really lovely. Brooke and the other characters go on about how sweet Eve is, and how giving, and there is some truth in this, although I always found her a bit clingy and disturbing. But Anna is at least as giving as Eve is, and it’s clear to me throughout that, even when she’s making some crazy decisions, she is trying to do the right thing. Not all her actions make sense though. I wasn’t convinced by Anna’s decision to hide the pregnancy from her boyfriend Ronan. There wasn’t really a convincing reason for it – except as a really obvious way of making you start wondering whether the baby was Ronan’s – and once the pregnancy is out in the open, everything is more or less fine. Anna’s stupidity is part of the reason why she is such a likeable character (whatever Brooke says), but Hill really does stretch credibility too far at times.

The most successful character is probably Sam. She’s very kind and supportive, even though she’s not always having a great time herself. Her crush on Anna’s boyfriend Ronan is nearly as adorable as Ronan himself. Eve gets her knickers in a twist, worried that Sam is going to make a move on him, but if she knew her sister half as well as I did, she’d know this would never happen. And there’s nothing wrong with having a crush on someone. I’ve got a crush on all sorts of people, including some married ones, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to make a move on any of them. I think Boris Johnson is really sexy, but even if he was single, I know we wouldn’t get on. I hate politics; I’m even less organised than he is, and I think our differing opinions on the proposed Docklands Light Railway extension to Dagenham Dock would get in the way of any romance.

The Last to Know has a lot of twists, and some of them are very clever. But Sam quite often saw them coming. I wouldn’t have minded but it felt as though I’d hardly had the chance to work anything out for myself. It’s no fun knowing what’s going to happen in advance. Not when I’m reading a book for the first time anyway. And there were plenty of stupid twists too. This is a shame, as the idea is very clever. Perhaps if Eve, Sam and Anna had been given a stronger story, and if Brooke had had a story too (and if she’d dropped all the ooh what great writing crap), it might have worked really well.

And a train from Liverpool Lime Street to London Victoria?????? I don’t think so. Oh, it’s possible. The lines are all joined up. You could get the train from Liverpool Lime Street and follow the usual route as far as Willesden Junction, then the tran could take the Kensington Olympia branch and turn off just before Clapham Junction, taking the line to Battersea Park and Victoria. But apart from the fact that trains on that route just don't exist, what’s the point in doing that? What’s wrong with the direct train to Euston?

The Stepmother (Carrie Adams)**

2008-12-27T23:13:00.002Z

So, which is the best Tube line for a marriage proposal? Tessa isn’t thrilled when James proposes on the Northern Line. Her colleague Matt thinks a nice line like the Central or the Piccadilly Line would have been okay, but not a depressing line like the Hammersmith & City. But the Northern Line is, apparently, the worst of all.

The Piccadilly Line is my favourite, but it would be the worst for a marriage proposal. It’s full of disused stations and branches. There’s no way I’d be listening to what anyone was saying to me. The Northern Line would actually be one of the best, as long as we’re on the Charing Cross branch. But ideally, I’d choose the Bakerloo Line. Anywhere between Regent’s Park and Lambeth North, proposals are welcome. If I want to marry you, that is.

The book is about Bea, who’s split up from her husband Jimmy who is now dating Tessa who calls him James. It starts off quite nicely, making you assume Jimmy is still married to Bea, and then it goes downhill from there.

The problem with the book is that it is either too long or too short. Too short because Adams is writing about a group of people with a whole multitude of problems, and she doesn’t really go into any of them very deeply. It’s too long because what is there just isn’t very interesting. The book has alcoholism, death, serious illness, adolescence, panic attacks, abortion, violence and sex (I’d recommend turning a few pages very rapidly when Tessa starts her striptease: you do not want to know). Any those ingredients can make an exciting book, but there are really too many of them for just one.

Fourteen year old Amber (she’s up herself, just like Amber in The Chocolate Run) is the most interesting character, but she seems more like ten than fourteen, which makes it all the more shocking when she starts snogging a seventeen year old called Caspar – although, to be honest, Caspar has a similar mental age to Amber, so in that respect they’re a good match. Jimmy is a bit useless and thick, which can be quite attractive, but not here. He’s quite kind when Bea has a panic attack in a clothes shop (perfectly natural: it’s happened to me, and I’m not even fat) but otherwise he’s a selfish twat. It’s amazing Bea and Tessa both want him. I don’t!

As for Bea and Tessa, Adams’ two first-person narrators… well, I didn’t like either of them really. Part of the problem with Bea is that Jimmy treated her really badly, and she still hasn’t recovered, but she’s just an object of sympathy, not actually a likeable person. You also miss a lot of her story because during the sections from Tessa’s point of view, you only know about what Bea’s up to from second-hand reports that actually end up telling you more about Tessa’s paranoia than they do about Bea.

Tessa is certainly well-meaning, but there’s something very hard about her. She has problems, and they do upset her, but she deals with them in her own way, and she doesn’t seem to need much help or sympathy, although considering I hated her from the start – the book starts from Bea’s point of view, and gives the impression Tessa will be a villain character - I suppose she did grow on me a bit. Tessa also starred in Adams’ novel The Godmother. Maybe if I’d read that first, I might have liked Tessa a bit more, but the book is a complete story, rather than an obvious continuation. That’s one thing in its favour.

There are some nice humorous touches, such as Amber’s ‘romp’ in the bushes, and the moment where Bea and Tessa see one another for the first time, which is shown from both their very different points of view. But mostly it didn’t quite work.

Thanks for the Memories (Cecelia Ahern)***

2008-12-25T00:39:00.003Z

Joyce’s father, the wonderfully characterised Henry, is doing a quiz, which asks which opera the famous words “Too many notes, Mozart” were describing. “Emperor Joseph II!” Joyce says instantly, and then wonders how she could possibly have known such a thing. It was indeed Emperor Joseph II who said it, but neither Joyce nor Henry seem to notice that the question actually asking for an opera title. There is some dispute about whether the opera in question was The Abduction from the Seraglio or The Marriage of Figaro - Figaro has more notes, but Seraglio was composed first, so the comment could have been made before Figaro came into existence. I’ll go along with The New Penguin Opera Guide and say it was Seraglio. But the answer is definitely not Emperor Joseph II.

The main part of the book is about the sudden feeling of connection between Joyce, who has suffered a miscarriage, and university lecturer Justin. Justin gives blood that is received by Joyce in hospital – and somehow she has accessed his knowledge and memories, and has become an expert on opera, art and languages, among other things. After you get over the sheer unreality of it, it becomes very sweet. There almost-meetings are quite amusing, and there’s a strong feeling that Joyce and Justin would get on well, and be very good for each other.

But they don’t meet, and then it all goes wrong. Suddenly, their interest in each other becomes obsessive and creepy. At this point, the story stops being a sweet romance, and becomes something much more disturbing. Joyce insists she is not stalking Justin, but that’s how it looks. While Justin is more restrained, he certainly breaks the law in his attempts to find Joyce.

I’m sure it’s possible to write a great book about a couple of people who are stalking one another. It’s also possible to write a great book about two people who are magically drawn to one another. The problem is, it’s probably impossible to do both in the same book. From a romance with an element of mystery, magic and, crucially, comedy – common themes in Ahern’s books: see also PS I Love You, A Place Like Here and particularly If You Could See Me Now – it becomes a disturbing psychological drama. I started off wanting Joyce and Justin to meet and get together, but after a while I wanted them to stay well away from each other.

***For a more positive (and brilliantly written) review of this book, visit Amy's blog Fairy Kisses***

Joyce and Justin are good characters in both halves of the book. In the first half, Joyce is lovely and patient and kind. Justin is absolutely adorable: intelligent in a geeky sort of way, but completely hopeless socially. In the second half, they are not unlikeable. There’s no reason why insane people shouldn’t be nice. Actually, some of the nicest people I’ve met have been insane. But you can’t change genre halfway through. Not like this anyway.

An Absolute Scandal (Penny Vincenzi)**

2008-12-21T23:41:00.002Z

The only scandal is that this book was published in the first place. Oh, there were some bits I loved - Blue Horton is one of the most gorgeous heroes ever – but NO book needs to be this long. It might have worked as a trilogy – it was good enough for Tolkien, after all – but you don’t need this many storylines. I can usually remember who everyone is without referring to a Dramatis Personnae but I practically needed to write notes in order to keep track of who was doing what with whom.

The Blue/Lucinda/Nigel storyline was lovely – no complaints about that one except I wanted Blue for myself. Their story alone would probably have made a novel of reasonable length, and possibly one with five stars instead of two. Lucinda is an adorable, innocent Sloane Ranger who married Nigel because she couldn’t imagine anything could be nicer than marrying someone so kind, gentle, rich and upper class. Then she meets the sexy, working class (but rich) Blue who probably was just after a quick one to start with, but he falls in love with commendable speed and is absolutely lovely apart from being a little bit immature and not very good at controlling his emotions. Just my type.

Married couple Elizabeth and Simon are both very strong and interesting characters. In case you’re wondering, Elizabeth doesn’t have much of a social life - as she realises at the end of the book - but there is something very powerful and commanding about her. You feel that if she wanted a social life, she’d go out and get one right now. Simon has a sex problem. Everyone else goes on about how charming he is and I suppose they’ve got a point, but the thing that really caught my attention about Simon is what a pervert he is. In a likeable sort of way.

Flora Fielding is a matriarchal, magnificently terrifying grandmother, and I did like the way her less than posh daughter-in-law Debbie was allowed to be intelligent – not that she always makes this obvious. Debbie’s heart is in the right place, but she is the sort of person who becomes very irritating after a while, so perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to put her in an 800 page novel. But her husband Richard is such a bossy, toffy prat, I think I’d be a bit whiny as well if I was married to him. (Hang on, I’m a bit whiny already.)

But there must be a good fifteen ‘main’ characters, and I can’t help thinking it would have been a stronger book with a more manageable number of storylines. It's great the way Elizabeth and Simon’s posh daughter Annabel is expelled from school and then decides to be a hairdresser. Brilliant idea. But we didn’t need to hear all about her relationships too. There’s enough going on already, and her boyfriend Jamie is, frankly, boring – although his bonkers snobby mother Frances is so much like someone I know, she ended up being quite funny. Catherine Morgan is clearly a lovely person, and very useful as a plot device, but having her back story as well just made things even more complicated.

Novels with multiple points of view can be fascinating – just some examples from this blog are The Girls, Getting Rid of Matthew, A Hidden Life and The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet. But there are also several unsuccessful examples as well – like Chart Throb, The Nanny and Ten Days in the Hills. On the whole (although certainly not exclusively), the more ‘protagonists’ there are, the less I’ve enjoyed the book. (Yes, I know you can’t really have more than one protagonist, but ‘polyagonist’ sounds silly.) When the characters are quite similar, it’s hard to tell them apart. When they’re very different, it’s difficult not to have favourites, as well as characters you really don’t like – and it’s inevitable this will lead to the frustrations of having too much of those you dislike, and not enough of those you love.

The main plot is based around Lloyd’s of London. Not the bank, apparently: I never did work out quite who they were which apparently means I’m even less intelligent than Lucinda (which is good news in that I might have a chance with Blue). But I think they’re something to do with insurance, and they have ‘syndicates’ of very rich people who receive a share of the money when Lloyd’s is going well, but owe Lloyd’s money when things are going badly. The Names (the members of the syndicate, I think that means) are supposed to be really rich people who can afford to pay several thousand pounds a year if things go badly, but because of some dirty dealing, a lot of the people in the syndicates really can’t afford it – and indeed, even the rich people are struggling, having to sell at least one of their houses, and even being forced to send their children to state school, which is beyond terrible. The Names therefore band together and discuss what they can do about Lloyd’s – apparently, even if they resign from being a Name, they still have to pay the money for the rest of their lives.

It’s all very complicated and rather boring, but the main problem with this idea is that it never seems to be resolved. Most of the ‘polyagonists’ do have their situations resolved in one way or another, and not always in a good way, but it doesn’t solve the problem for everyone. As far as I can see, this means that the efforts to fight Lloyd’s as a group as failed, which is a shame when so much of the plot has been devoted to this. Perhaps this is the realistic ending, and perhaps one of Vincenzi’s points is that there are more important things in life than money, but it is a bit annoying that something so important, at least in the beginning, is never really brought to any sort of conclusion.

Then there’s all the vomiting. Maybe, as an emetophobe, I’m slightly biased against this, but it does seem to happen to almost everyone in the book far more often than is healthy. The morning sickness is, I suppose, acceptable; the stomach bugs are very useful for keeping wives away from their lovers (although I do wish I’d been spared the details), and the drunkenness is certainly amusing to some people, if not me. But the way everyone appears to do it when they get stressed is totally unacceptable. Not only is this extremely uncomfortable reading for emetophobes, it shows a distinct lack of imagination on the part of the author. There are many ways in which people might react to stress, and considering that all Vincenzi’s characters have such different personalities, they should also have different reactions. There was a bit of crying and shaking, which was nice, but a bit more fainting and tantrums and eating chocolate would have made a real difference.

Vincenzi’s lack of imagination also extended to the way the men looked at the women. All the men seemed to be leg men, which really isn’t that realistic. Just because Lucinda and Debbie and Felicity and God knows who else happen to have great legs, it doesn’t mean their legs have to be pretty much their only good feature. There are more leg men in this book than I’ve met in my whole life. I’ve had all kinds of blokey conversations with my guy mates, but I think the closest we’ve got to discussing which girls have the best legs is when we’ve wondered which girls are sufficiently flexible to perform the entire Kama Sutra (apparently, I am).

And then there’s the fact Simon likes ‘popular’ opera. Fair enough, but this seems to include Beethoven and not Mozart. I would expect operas like The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro to count as popular. And Beethoven only wrote one opera, Fidelio, which is hardly ‘easy listening’: it’s got a role for a Heldentenor. It’s not all that popular either.

Also I don’t think there is a McDonalds opposite High Street Kensington. The Tube station in question isn’t mentioned by name, but I’m pretty sure this is the only Tube station near Kensington Gardens which is one stop from the Central Line and ‘on the way to’ Piccadilly Circus – apart from Bayswater, but that’s only five minutes up the road from Queensway (which is on the Central Line, so you’d have to be really stupid to go to Bayswater in those circumstances). But perhaps there was a McDonalds opposite High Street Kensington in 1990.

There are definitely parts of An Absolute Scandal where you want to keep on reading because there are loads of interesting things going on, and you do want to know how things work out. But after a while, you stop getting that excited because the book is so anticlimactic. Vincenzi will often open a paragraph by saying something very dramatic, but after she’s told you that, there’s almost not much point in reading the rest of that section because you know what’s going to happen. Another annoying habit of hers is ending a chapter at a crucial point, but then not going back to those characters for days, even weeks later, when the crisis is long over.

But Blue is in it so I’ll forgive Vincenzi almost everything.

The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)***

2008-12-18T16:44:00.003Z

I love Sophie Kinsella and I love Becky Bloomwood. I love Luke Brandon too, and I want to take him home with me. Anyone who’s read my blog will know how much I love Kinsella and her characters, and anyone who hasn’t read it knows it now.

But, if I’d read the first book in the series first, I don’t know if I would have read the others.

In some ways, it’s exactly the same as the last Shopaholic book I’ve read, Shopaholic Abroad, which I think is the second in the series. Becky (or Rebecca as she’s mostly called in this book: I love the name Rebecca, but it doesn’t suit her) spends loads of money on clothes; gets into serious financial trouble; gets into huge arguments with Luke, then somehow manages to solve her own and Luke’s problems in the most dramatic possible way. Actually, apart from the ‘serious financial trouble’ part, it’s very similar to the other Shopaholic book I’ve read as well: Shopaholic & Baby.

I will read the other ones because I loved the first two I read. And I’m sure it won’t actually matter if all the other stories are very similar. Even now, I want to read more about Becky, and especially more about Luke, and I would actually be disappointed if Kinsella’s next book was called ‘Shopaholic Gets Divorced’ (which would be all about how Luke leaves Becky for a blogging bookaholic called Sophie… me-Sophie not Kinsella) because I really like the relationship between Becky and Luke. ‘Shopaholic Gets Divorced’ would probably end up a bit like Me and Mr Darcy so it’s really best if it stays in my head.

The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic was disappointing not because it was the same as all the others. It was disappointing because I was expecting a comedy and got a horror story. There are some amusing moments, but they're not nearly as funny as some of the scenes in Kinsella’s later books, and I never really felt that I was happy for Becky to get away completely with all her lies and financial problems. Also, disappointingly, Kinsella leaves out some of the scenes I was looking forward to reading. Like Becky’s first meeting with Luke. Kinsella shows little of the great rapport between the two characters in this book, usually so brilliantly written (but perhaps yet to be developed). They barely even seemed to like each other. So the ending didn’t seem right at all.

Luke is sweet and lovely, though, and even a little bit useless on at least one occasion. Becky’s friend Suze is great as well – it’s interesting to see how her story starts. In some ways, Suze is the most interesting character in Kinsella’s books because she has a story that develops a little bit more in each book, whereas Becky, in many ways, is always the same person with the same problems.

Some of the lies Becky tells are absolutely dreadful. She could have got Derek Smeath, her poor bank manager, into serious trouble. Either she’s a horrible person or she’s got a really serious psychological condition that needs treatment. The other books were comedy, but this one was actually unsettling to read at times.

A Friend Like Henry (Nuala Gardner)****

2008-12-16T00:12:00.002Z

Stories about autism can be really annoying. Not so much that people get it wrong – and Nuala Gardner doesn’t – but it’s just that books like these are often a neuro-typical (i.e. non-autistic person)’s only source of knowledge about autism. It really annoys me when people make assumptions about me based on a book about someone else. How would you feel if someone did it to you? This book may be helpful and inspiring; it’s undeniably informative; it probably will help a parent with an autistic child to know they’re not alone – and it’s a great read. But it only tells you about Nuala Gardner’s children, Dale and Amy. It doesn’t tell you anything about me, and not a great deal about autistics in general. This isn’t a criticism – I’m just saying no-one should read this book and expect to have the same experiences with any autistics they might meet. (I’ve met soooo many people who expect me to be a carbon copy of the boy in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.)

Gardner isn’t really setting out to educate us about the complete autistic spectrum. She acknowledges the spectrum, but she’s writing about her children. So she quite rightly tells us about their autism and how she experienced it. I think it’s important to realise that not every autistic person will achieve what Dale does, and also that not every parent will be as successful as Nuala. Everyone is different: autistic or not. Everyone’s lives are different. Nuala helped her children successfully partly because she’s a lovely, warm, and amazing person, but also because she happened to be the right person to help Dale and Amy, and because she happened to be in a position where she was able to give that help. Some parents might not be able to achieve what Nuala has, but it mostly won’t be because they’re bad people. It’s possible that some parents might unknowingly treat their children in a way that affects them negatively – but that’s not really treating them badly. Like Nuala and like all other parents, all they can do is their best according to their own knowledge about the world - as autistic people do every day.

This book does seem to support the view that being autistic is like living in a glass box and being unable to get out. As an autistic person myself, I can say it is not like that for me. I spend most of my life partly or fully in Sophieworld because I love it there, and if you’ve got yourself an imaginary friend or two, you’ll never be alone, and you’ll rarely be bored. I don’t think I really live in my Sophiebox. It’s more like I’ve got a little box full of imaginary friends and I can get them out and play with them anytime I want to. If someone upsets me, these friends can give me a hug straight away. They know what’s wrong because they were there the whole time. And they’re much easier to be around than most real people.

Autistics don’t have an imagination? Well, I’ve got one. (My psychology teacher said I don’t really have an imagination, I only think I do. But she also said my exam started at 2.30, and she was wrong about that. It was at 2.) Just because an autistic person doesn’t appear to be playing imaginatively, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole world in their head.

A Friend Like Henry might have annoyed me if it had been badly written – a lot of people are commissioned to write about their experiences simply because a publisher’s heard of them from somewhere, like maybe they’re famous for something else; maybe they’ve appeared on TV or been featured in a magazine or newspaper. When this happens, writing ability doesn’t seem to be much of a concern. But Gardner is a fantastic writer. I don’t know if she realised it at the time, but she wasn’t only letting people into Dale’s world. She was also, to some extent, letting me into the world of being a neuro-typical person. Gardner always makes her points clearly and well – which must be a huge help for Dale and Amy. Everything is described so vividly; so lovingly. Even though a lot of the things she said were negative, I could tell she loves her children.

The people she writes about are really well-described. The horrible people in the health department are probably not people I’ve met, as the book is set in Scotland, but I’ve met people like them. Dale and Amy seem like a really lovely children. I always love finding characters I identify with, and they were people I identified with strongly. He loves trains! She loves horses! It was fun reading the book and finding all these things I do or used to do, although Dale, Amy and I are very different in most respects.

The ‘Henry’ in the title is a dog, named after Dale’s favourite train from Thomas the Tank Engine. He certainly is a wonderful dog, who has helped Dale and his whole family a great deal. Henry is great with autistic people, and also great with people who are generally scared of dogs. But a lot of the credit for Dale and Amy’s positive experiences should go to Nuala and her husband Jamie.

It did upset me when Nuala said ‘what did I do to deserve an autistic child’. It made me feel very guilty and a bit suicidal. But I’d like to look at it another way. Yes, autistic people are an awful lot of trouble (I can be a proper nightmare) but if autistic children have to be born into the world, is it better for them to go to someone as lovely and kind and sweet as Nuala (and my parents aren’t all that bad either) - or to someone who doesn’t understand at all?

This is a great book which I enjoyed very much, and it’s really good that people like Gardner are able to share their experiences, and provide help and encouragement to others.

The Chocolate Lovers' Diet (Carole Matthews)****

2008-12-13T14:03:00.003Z

Carole Matthews opens The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet by saying I’m a bitch.

Bitches, apparently, are people who can’t eat whole Mars Bars, or more than one square of dark chocolate at a time. That’s definitely me. Half a Mars bar or one square of dark chocolate makes me feel sick. As I have emetophobia, it’s quite a big thing for me to be eating chocolate at all, but I still have about four squares of milk chocolate a day. So I can’t be all that bitchy. (It’s not for weight reasons after all. If I ate a whole bar of chocolate every day, I’d probably get thinner. And then I really would be a bitch.)

Yes, I know I was complaining when Dorothy Koomson’s The Chocolate Run was all about chocolate, but this is different. The way in which Lucy, Chantal, Autumn and Nadia go mad over chocolate seems quite reasonable to me, and the girls do have plenty of other outside interests. There isn’t a surplus of film-talk, and all sex scenes (except those involving Lucy’s parents) are done in the best possible taste.

And you can’t really blame these women for needing quite as much chocolate as they do. When you read it, you’ll see what I mean. Crises seem to follow them around. To work; to their parents’ houses; to their weddings. Some of these crises are hilarious: Matthews is a wonderful comic writer. But she doesn’t get much chance to show it because a lot of this book is quite sad. Just because the central characters are totally insane, particularly Lucy, it’s easy to get caught up into thinking this book is a comedy. And then something awful happens, just when you’re not expecting it, and then it all gets worse and worse.

If you’re looking for realism, this might not be the book for you - but, on the other hand, I usually look for realism, and I loved it. Most authors who try to pull anything even vaguely unrealistic hear all about it from me in this blog. But Matthews gets away with it. Her book is just too much fun (apart from the sad bits) for me to care that they should all have been arrested. Besides, they’ve been through so much, you feel it’s time they had a bit of crazy fun.

The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet has some great characters. It’s a bit hard to imagine how the girls became friends, as chocolate seems to be the only thing they have in common, but it’s very easy to believe they’re genuinely close. Lucy is no more intelligent than you’d expect from a fictional girl with that name, and her boyfriend Aiden shares with Aidan from Anybody Out There the bad habit of disappearing when his girlfriend needs him (although both have a very good reason). Chantal is a surprisingly respectable sex addict; Autumn an upper-class hippie, and Nadia a woman of amazing courage and kindness. But they do care about each other. Even chocolate comes a poor second.

There are sections told from the points of view from all four women, but, unusually, Lucy’s is told in the first person (and in the present tense and the others in the third person (past tense). This did mean I felt closer to Lucy than the other characters, but that wasn’t really a problem. If you met the Chocolate Lovers for real, Lucy is probably the one you’d get close to first. Lucy is the comedy character, providing relief when everyone else’s life is falling apart, and often just failing to notice that her own is doing the same. Without her, Nadia’s, Autumn’s and Chantal’s stories would have been so much darker, and, while it might have been a more powerful book, it wouldn’t have been half as fun. We know that chocolate can’t really cure all these problems, but it’s nice to pretend it does.

Maybe the book gets a bit slushy at the end, but that’s only to be expected when there’s a chocolate fountain spraying everywhere.

This is the second of two books, but I read this one first and it works very well as a stand-alone book.

The Chocolate Run (Dorothy Koomson)**

2008-12-11T20:01:00.004Z

Sex, chocolate and films. Some people would say these are the greatest things in the world, but they’re not enough to make a book. (But at least the presence of chocolate saves this book from being another Ten Days in the Hills.)

However it would be difficult to put anything else in the book when sex, chocolate and films are pretty much all Amber Salpone thinks about. And as for what Amber calls a ‘chocolate run’ (which incidentally is not included in the list of definitions of ‘chocolate run’ provided by Dorothy Koomson at the end of the book), well, it’s a little bit disturbing. I know I’m not in a position to condemn other people for having weird habits but seriously, I hope she washed her hands first.

There are things I like about Amber. I like the fact she doesn’t care if she’s a Size 14/16. I like her humour. It’s not always appropriate, but it’s usually funny. But the way she keeps saying that her friend/lover Greg is a bastard and a tart (can guys be tarts? I think gay men can but Amber’s in trouble if Greg is gay) and not a nice guy is really horrible. Especially since Greg is really incredibly lovely.

Another problem with Amber is that she gets away with things she shouldn’t. Like when she doesn’t do her ‘homework’ for her boss Renée because she was too busy having sex - Renée has a go at her. Perfectly natural, I’d say. Renée had to cancel a meeting because of Amber. But Amber then tells us Renée ‘did the decent thing’ – she cancelled the meeting and brought Amber some Maltesers to make up for snapping at her. It’s not good to shout at people but it’s worse not to do your job properly, and to cause inconvenience to others. It’s possible Renée knows about Amber’s domestic violence past – the past she never talks about – and feels guilty for showing even verbal aggression towards her, but Amber is being paid, and she needs to do her work.

Amber also goes on about how attractive she is. It makes a nice change from the women who go on about how unattractive they are but the more Amber talks about it, the more it seems like conceitedness rather than confidence. It doesn’t help the plot for Amber to say these things. And while we’re on the subject of the things Amber says, why does she say ‘gotten’? I can see how she has picked up ‘owt’ and ‘nowt’ from working in Leeds, but where does the American come from? I did check my A Level English Language books, but ‘gotten’ doesn’t seem to be part of Black English – and while Amber’s English is colloquial, she doesn’t really speak Black English anyway.

Amber is not unconvincing as a character – but she isn’t very likeable. Maybe it would have helped if Greg was a bit more of a bastard and a bit less of a sweet guy with no taste in women – at least Amber’s observations about him would have seemed a bit more reasonable. Amber’s best friend Jen was well-characterised (I couldn’t stand the little bitch), and Renée does seem convincingly French. But Koomson made a mistake when she called Jen’s boyfriend Matt. I was okay with it when he was called Matt, but Amber refers to him just once as ‘Matthew’, and that did it for me. We all know what fictional Matthews are like. ‘He’s got another woman on the go!’ was my immediate thought – and you’ll never guess what.

Although the book is mostly funny, there are also some serious elements. Amber’s fear of domestic violence was disturbing in all the right ways. Koomson writes these parts so powerfully, it doesn’t matter that I don’t much like Amber. No-one deserves that, and her resulting trust issues are more than likely part of the reason why Amber’s such a bitch. However, the domestic violence theme doesn’t seem completely necessary to the plot (although admittedly it is difficult to comment on the plot when I’m not totally sure if there is one). I feel really bad about saying this, but it seems rather as though the domestic violence was put in either for dramatic effect, or to drum up some much-needed sympathy for the protagonist.

But you have to applaud Koomson for giving her protagonist so many imperfections. A lot of people have a bitchy streak, after all. (You only have to read my reviews to find out whether I’ve got one.)

I’ll just add, the other Koomson book I’ve read, My Best Friend’s Girl (review to be posted later), was a lot more enjoyable. It has many of the same elements as The Chocolate Run – child abuse, a not terribly likeable protagonist, trust issues – but My Best Friend’s Girl worked. So read that one instead.

Seeing Me Naked (Liza Palmer)***

2008-12-05T23:14:00.002Z

Before you get excited, Elisabeth Page has no problems with being literally naked. Almost the first thing she does it to wander into her boyfriend’s kitchen without any clothes on and give the cleaning lady a fright. The book is more about learning to be emotionally naked. Well, it’s supposed to be, but it actually seems to be more about Elisabeth’s attempts not to be a superior bitch.

As you’ve probably guessed, Elisabeth is not the most sympathetic of characters. Like Elizabeth in If You Could See Me Now, she has no social life, Elisabeth/Elizabeth apparently being the standard name for women who don’t have any friends. This characteristic in itself isn’t unappealing. We’ve probably all felt lonely at least once in our lives.

But the reason Elisabeth doesn’t have any friends is probably because she’s a snobby bitch who sneers at everyone she meets. I have no idea why she has such a problem with lovely Margot, who is always so kind to her. And so what if Margot’s friend doesn’t pluck her eyebrows and shaves her legs? Maybe she just has better things to do, like looking after her new baby and being nice to people. When Elisabeth starts talking about what a bitch her workmate Julie is, I did actually end up agreeing with her, but by this time I was rather disinclined to rely on her bitchy judgement.

Elisabeth isn’t the worst person in the book. Her father, Ben, is absolutely dreadful, looking down on Elisabeth because she’s ‘only’ a pastry chef in a top restaurant rather than an award-winning writer like him and her brother. I was interested enough to hope this got resolved in the end, which it did, but I wish it hadn’t happened in the slushiest and most tear-sodden way possible. Maybe the Page family should forget writing and baking, and start solving water shortage problems. I almost began to understand why people use that phrase, usually so inexplicable to an emetophobe, ‘I want to vomit’.

Elisabeth seems to think her life isn’t great, and it certainly isn’t perfect. And, to some extent, it doesn’t matter how good her life seems: if she’s not happy, it’s not the right life for her, and maybe she needs to consider a change. But, having decided she needs a change, great opportunities suddenly start to fall into her lap. She doesn’t have to do anything: they just appear. Maybe I’m just as much of a bitch as she is, but I prefer to see my heroines suffering a bit more, and working a bit harder to make things happen.

Elisabeth meets a guy called Daniel and decides to start an affair with him – even though she has a boyfriend. Yes, her relationship with her boyfriend Will is far from ideal, but it still would have been nice to let Will know she was interested in seeing other people before dragging Daniel into bed.

It would also have been easier to identify with Elisabeth if her relationship with Daniel wasn’t instantly perfect. They have a few problems later on, yes, but it’s a bit surprising Daniel goes along so trustingly with her attempts to seduce him. But Daniels, (see also PS I Love You) are drippy types who fall in love at the drop of a hat and like nothing more than being bossed around. The book says it’s Daniel who helps her to be emotionally naked but Elisabeth seems very much the dominant one.

Then Elisabeth is offered the chance of an alternative job – her own TV cooking show. Of course, her father doesn’t think this is good enough either. But apart from that, it all goes brilliantly. The TV people think she’s adorable. She is a ‘natural’ at speaking to the camera. The book is supposed to be about Elisabeth overcoming her insecurities, but we don’t see many signs of them, and when she does overcome something, she doesn’t really let us in on the process of overcoming it.

But I’m giving this book three stars because Liza Palmer is very funny. You don’t need to like Elisabeth to see the humour in the book. Even though nothing much happens in the first half, there are lots of funny moments, some of which might make you cringe, but in a Shopaholic way, not a Me and Mr Darcy way. Seeing Me Naked is occasionally slow, but not boring, and I did want to know what happened to the characters. There are some great characters you do like and care about – Elisabeth’s brother Rascal (brilliant name, although he’s so sappy, it hardly suits him); her fellow chef Samuel, and, of course, his endlessly kind and friendly wife Margot.

Palmer also deserves credit for not making too much of the fact that both Rascal and Ben are novelists, although Ben’s view that novel-writing is the most superior career of all is something I hope Palmer doesn’t believe herself.

Another strength of this book is that Palmer manages to make cooking seem interesting and creative. Now I don’t dislike cooking, I’m just a bit slow at it and I’m a bit scared I might poison myself because I keep getting confused between the cooking oil and the washing up liquid. However, this didn’t stop me from wondering vaguely if I’d enjoy pastry-making. I’m quite sure I wouldn’t, and I know I’d be terrible at it, but it seemed quite interesting when I was reading the book.

The Birds and the Bees (Milly Johnson)***

2008-11-30T15:40:00.002Z

Parents are so annoying sometimes. I’m not talking about the parents in this book, although I’m sure they’d annoy me too if I happened to live with them. But my parents loved this book and now I feel like I ought to have loved it too. And I suppose I did in a way. I stayed up all night to finish it, and I was satisfied when the book turned out exactly how I wanted it to turn out. But how can my dad tell me this is the best book I’ve read recently? Why do parents always know better than me? I’m the one who was offered a place to study English at UCL. (I turned it down, but that’s hardly the point.) So I should know a little bit about reading. But that’s the thing about parents. They always know best.

The parents in this book also know best. Catherine, the best friend of the heroine, Stevie, is clearly some kind of Superwoman who juggles what seems like a huge number of children, not to mention Stevie’s son Danny and Stevie herself. Only Catherine’s considerable warmth and generosity save her from being annoyingly perfect. I love Catherine. I just wish she wouldn’t go on about how sweet Stevie is all the time. There are many adjectives that spring to mind when I think of Stevie, but ‘sweet’ is not one of them.

Oh, I quite like Stevie now, but it was an uphill struggle to begin with. Any author who keeps going on about how nice her main character is - and also makes the other characters point it out at every opportunity - really gets on my nerves. I’m not interested in what Milly Johnson thinks of Stevie. It’s up to me to decide what she’s like. When I finally did start to like her, about halfway through the book (the point when the story really got going), I still didn’t think she was sweet. She’s far too tough and feisty with too much of a no-nonsense approach to be described as sweet. Yes, she is very generous, and she certainly seems altruistic. But she’s too strong and redoubtable to be my idea of sweet. (But, to be honest, if Johnson had described about her in ways that I agreed with, that would probably have annoyed me too. Just get on with telling the story, woman!)

And Stevie’s name! Apparently she’s named after some female poet I’ve never heard of, which is fine in theory, but it was just a bit distracting. I didn’t mind that the other girl was called Jo: that’s an established and common female name. But giving your heroine an unusual female name for no particular reason is just annoying.

If there had been just one joke about Stevie’s name, like if Adam had insisted on calling her Stephanie - which would have really annoyed her, as well as fitting in with the idea of Adam’s stubborn nature - there would have been a point to it. Or if she’d signed up to join Adam’s gym online, it might have been quite funny if he came to meet the new male member of the gym and instead found the fiancée of the man who ran off with his wife. Or if Stevie’s parents (who make the briefest appearances) were very obviously the type to bestow an unusual name upon their daughter - instead of seeming more the type not to bother naming her at all - I’d have understood.

Once the story does start, Johnson’s writing becomes fast-paced and witty, but her characters still have sufficient depth (well, apart from shallow bitch Jo) to make you interested in what happens. Even the smallest characters seem very real. Like Stevie’s nice but excruciating friend Pam – probably everyone in the world either knows someone like Pam or has heard of someone like her.

The story was a bit slow to start off with. The early chapters mostly show Stevie having her hair done, refusing to talk to Adam, and thinking about how miserable she is. I got a bit bored with that part. It would have been much more interesting if Adam had told Stevie his plan for both of them to win their partners back near the beginning; Stevie could then have dismissed it, before gradually coming around to it. At least then you’d feel the characters were progressing in some way.

Adam the Scotsman makes a rather bad first impression too, but that works well. He is actually really lovely in a big, loud sort of way. Johnson’s transcription of his sexy Scottish accent sounds very authentic, even if his generosity doesn’t.

Matthew, Stevie’s ex, is a totally useless prat who has his brain between his legs. Nevertheless, he, if anyone, is the ‘sweet’ one – incredibly stupid, but well-meaning when he remembers other people have feelings too. He’s not unlike Matthew in Getting Rid of Matthew. I must write a book one day about useless Lucy; Isobel, who seems to have the perfect life but is actually pretty fucked up; James the wanker, and Matthew the immature prat.

And, yes, Stevie is a writer, but I’ll forgive Johnson for writing about a writer. It does give the plot a very interesting twist. And, yes, Stevie is intelligent enough to be literate. Easily. Forget the basic psychology Adam keeps going on about. Stevie knows way more about people than that annoying psychologist in The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy. So I quite liked her in the end.

Ten Days in the Hills (Jane Smiley)**

2008-11-28T16:48:00.001Z

Ten Days in the Hills could have been great, but there just wasn’t enough to keep me interested. It starts very promisingly with Elena and Max’s discovery that, instead of spending the next few days in bed, possibly making a porno (one good thing about the book is that this never happens), they must entertain the large number of guests (including Max’s ex-wife) that have simultaneously turned up on their doorstep, having all decided to interpret an invitation to ‘come and stay sometime’ as ‘come and stay right now’.

Rather than telling at least some of them to piss off like any sensible person would, Max and Elena decide to let them all stay, even though some of them hate each other. It sounded promising, as I thought they’d spend the whole time at each other’s throats, but, as Max’s house is so huge, they mostly manage to ignore the people they hate.

There are a few token moments of snappiness, but nothing to get too excited about. Most of the book is taken up with the characters, in various combinations, talking about films and having sex. And I don’t know about you, but I find that really, really boring. I can certainly imagine living for ten days or even ten weeks without even thinking about either activity. (Well.. films anyway.)

Maybe if I’d actually seen a few more of the films mentioned, those scenes might have been more interesting, but if I felt the urge to read some literary criticism of films, I’d go and find myself a non-fiction book. As for sex, EWWWWW. I don’t mind a few details that I can giggle over - I love the bit where Simon tells everyone he’d shaved his whole body in order to play a giant penis in a film, and the Russian girls’ tit-sucking isn’t completely uninteresting either from a bi-sexual point of view. But I don’t really want to know details about the state of a fifty-eight year old man’s cock. Or any man’s cock. As my grandma used to say, there’s nothing beautiful in that sight.

What I usually do in this situation is skip the cock and move onto the interesting bits, which is the characters interacting with one another. But if you skip the cock, you’re stuck with the films. I can stand a little bit of film talk, but it was like they were at it all day (and then they were at it in the figurative sense all night). For a long time, the little I knew about the characters came from what Jane Smiley and her characters told us. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity to see it for myself.

I can pretty much list all the conversations that weren’t about about films or sex – but these usually weren’t so much conversations as monologues. Elena is the one who talks about the war; Isabel is the one who talks about anthropology; Paul is the one who talks about psychological healing; Elena, Isabel, Paul and everyone else are the ones who talked about films and sex. Charlie is the one no-one likes, but even for him there was relatively little conflict. I didn’t even realise no-one liked Charlie until he suddenly shouted out that he didn’t feel welcome. The truth is, there were so many people in the house, I’d forgotten he was there.

The problem with the first half was that the situation promised tension, but it didn’t deliver. The characters weren’t trapped in the house together. There is no snowdrift; they aren’t housemates in Big Brother. They can - and do - leave the house in order to do other things and get away from each other. Isabel and Charlie - and possibly others - live so close, they can go home any time they want to. There was no real sense that the characters were crowding each other. There was no sense that the characters were treading carefully, or that an argument could happen at any moment. When the arguments did happen, they were either so quickly resolved, I never really had time to get interested in them, or they consisted of such ridiculously long speeches, I forgot what the argument was about in the first place.

Most of the ‘ten days in the hills’ take place in Max and Elena’s house, but the last few days are spent in a different large house while agent Stoney tries to persuade Max to make a film of Taras Bulba, which sounds exactly like the sort of film I wouldn’t want to see. This section was more enjoyable because at least then there was a sense of moving forward. The fact that all of Max and Elena’s guests decided to decamp together to the house of one of Stoney’s clients is a further sign that they are really all very comfortable with one another, despite the violent hatred Smiley writes about - but there is finally a sense of progress, and personalities slowly start to come more to the fore.

There are even moments of comedy, such as when Isabel casually announces that she and Stoney will share a room - apparently the others were too busy shagging each other to notice Isabel and Stoney were at it too. And it’s quite funny when Charlie suddenly finds himself being seduced by a young and beautiful girl. And there’s even one pretty good argument between Isabel and her mother, Zoe. Finally, there are bits of tension here and there.

For the first time, you really feel there’s a real plot rather than a series of scenes. Yes, there is still way too much film-talk and sex, but I felt that if the book had started here – and this section alone was almost long enough to be a book already - with a few more conversations on other subjects here and there, and a few more of those promised arguments, I think I’d have really enjoyed it.

But by then, it was really too late.

Shopaholic Abroad (Sophie Kinsella)****

2008-11-27T15:07:00.002Z

I don’t know how Becky gets away with it, I really don’t. She’s a financial advisor with her own slot on a TV show, and she has less idea of money management than a goldfish. No, it’s worse than that. She has less idea of money management than me. Becky as a financial advisor is the equivalent of me getting a job with Trinny and Susannah.

But Sophie Kinsella can make anything work. She’s such a wonderful writer. She has created some great characters in the Shopaholic books, which looks like a series that could go on for years. She’s also great at character. Becky is the most adorable person in the world, and it’s probably very difficult not to love her – whether you’re a book lover, or Becky’s bank manager.

Becky’s delightful originality of mind can lead to the most horrific of situations – and Kinsella never fails to make them seem completely natural. I have been told I’m more than a little bit odd, but you wouldn’t catch me going to a convent in nothing but a T-shirt and a hairband. Becky could easily make you want to cringe for her, but she doesn’t. She makes you want to adopt her.

However, underneath Sophie Kinsella’s wonderful humour, Becky does have a problem or two. Compulsive shopper; compulsive liar. And Becky’s problems land not only her but also her gorgeous boyfriend Luke (I want him) into serious difficulties. Kinsella can turn a situation from comic to tragic in an instant – very much as it can happen in real life.

Kinsella isn’t saying it’s okay to spend too much money and then lie about it. But she is saying that it doesn’t make you a totally despicable person who should be reviled for all eternity. She’s saying that even nice, funny, endearing people can get into terrible situations. She’s also saying it’s possible to get out of them.

Shopaholic Abroad isn’t the kind of book that goes around winning awards. If Kinsella had wanted to win awards, she’d probably have thrown Becky out on the streets and made her into a prostitute. And she’d probably have to lose the wonderful humour too. That’s the sort of thing judges seem to like nowadays: a bit of ‘realism’.

But Shopaholic Abroad is deceptively clever – and quite possibly a lot more so than all those award-winners. Underneath Kinsella’s brilliant comedy is the feeling that, if it happened to Becky, it really could happen to everyone. Becky is luckier than most: she has support from all over the place, and she didn’t fall far enough to hit any kind of clichéd rock bottom. But, with a character as easy to identify with as Becky, that just means it’s harder to say ‘that would never happen to me.’ Because it could.

Secrets and Shadows (Mary Nickson)****

2008-11-26T14:52:00.004Z

Why do characters who are writers make such unappealing protagonists? You’d think I’d love them. Apart from the fact that it’s writers that produce all those books I like to read, I like writing myself, so you’d think I’d find it easy to identify with writer characters.

Usually, it doesn’t work that way. There’s something about books within a book that I struggle with. In a way, it’s a compliment to the writer of the real book. If I’m enjoying their story, I want to keep on reading it. The last thing I want to do is sit down with someone else’s book. An exception would be something like Adele Geras’ A Hidden Life, where the featured book tells you the story of a dead major character. In a way, this is not so much extracts from a book as a flashback.

So you’d think I’d hate Secrets and Shadows. It’s all about a group of people who meet on a creative writing course. At the first session, examples of work are read out, (which I suppose is one way of getting to know such very different people’s inner thoughts and experiences). After that, the writing isn’t really important. It was just a means of getting the relevant characters together.

But I will have a couple of moans while I’m here. Why did everyone have to make it so obvious that they think Louisa (although, to be fair, she does have too many talents already) isn’t a good writer? Admiration of particular writing styles is such a personal thing. I actually found Louisa’s writing much more more readable than that of Marnie, for example, who is generally seen to be good.

Also, why is there such a strong feeling that only a few of the creative writers ought to carry on writing after they leave the course? Okay, not many of them have a chance of getting published. But what does that matter?

In the first place, there are lots of bad writers who get published – being talented won’t always give you an advantage. And secondly, and most importantly, writing is first and foremost an activity to be enjoyed. It doesn’t matter if you’re Jane Austen or… well, someone who had better remain nameless because I don’t want all their fans jumping all over me, but, just to clarify, I don’t mean Mary Nickson. If you enjoy writing stories, they are worth writing. It doesn’t matter if no-one ever reads the stories. If you enjoy writing, you should write.

While I’m on the subject of writing styles, I’ll say I do like Mary Nickson’s. Her style is quite poetic, with many clauses, but is relatively easy to read. I have read some books like that where I’ve had to read sentences three times before they begin to make sense. Secrets and Shadows is not an amusing book, but it’s thrilling and exciting, and some of the relationships between the characters are wonderfully done – you can tell a lot about them from very little conversation.

Nickson is also great at characters – I love the accidentally-abrasive Marnie; Christopher with his dark secret, (which is really sympathetically presented); married couple Isobel and Giles, whose relationship is based on a genuine friendship, as well as sexual attraction. (Nickson also writes the sex bits really well: usually I either get the giggles, or feel so embarrassed I skip these bits, but Nickson’s really sensitive about it, only using it to make a point and never going into unnecessary detail.) All the characters are wonderfully distinct. It’s a shame they all dislike Stanley so much, though – I’m sure part of the reason he’s so horrible is because he’s really insecure.

Louisa seems to be, in many ways, the heroine of the book, but I couldn’t help wondering whether the book would be better without her. Her instinctive ability to socialise with anyone is definitely not something everyone can identify with, and her jealousy of some of the other characters is not presented in a particularly attractive way. Louisa has had a horribly difficult life, but that alone isn’t enough to make me like her as a character. And then, in the end, it’s difficult to know what to think. I’m not at all sure whether I believe her.

I also have problems with the presentation of Isobel’s autistic son Edward. The autism itself is beautifully done – I guessed he was autistic as soon as he was mentioned, although the term wasn’t used until some time later. It was really heartening to read that he is happy (none of that glass box crap) and that he has an imagination – a lot of people think autistics don’t have an imagination, but I can assure you we do.

However, the way Isobel kept talking sadly about Edward and how he ‘might have been’ is really quite offensive. I love Isobel, but seriously babe, forget what he might have been. Look at what he is. He is a lovely boy; very loving towards his family; very gentle with his six year old cousin; astonishingly well-adjusted. He comes home from school to find the house full of strangers, and doesn’t seem in the least worried by it. You should be proud of him.

I certainly prefer him to musical genius twin sister Amy, who seems more than a little bit conceited. But Amy is treated in a similar way: Isobel spends the whole time talking about what she ‘will be’. So what will it be like for the poor girl if she fails to make a career as a successful musician? The chances are, she won’t. There are more gifted young people in the world than there are career opportunities, especially considering Amy is a violinist. Forget what Edward might have been; forget what Amy might be going to be. It’s who they are that matters. (And Amy’s up herself, so do something about it.)

But the problems weren’t bothering me throughout the book. Edward is barely in it; even Louisa’s importance diminishes as the book continues. There is so much else to enjoy, I mostly forgot what I didn’t like, and just got on with the story.

The Infidelity Chain (Tess Stimson)****

2008-11-24T22:56:00.002Z

I enjoyed this book a lot, but, if I were Tess Stimson’s spouse, I would be very very worried. Not only is this book all about infidelity, her last book was called The Adultery Club. Maybe she’s just a little bit obsessed?

The book is not totally pro-infidelity, but it is far from being against it. Not that I’m in a position to object to anyone else’s infidelity, and it could be argued that if a relationship has gone so far wrong that one or both of those involved has found themselves an outside interest, it’s probably too late as far as the marriage is concerned so they might as well get on with being happy. But, at the same time, the book does seem to be saying that infidelity is worth it if it’s in the name of true love, and I’m not really sure that’s true.

But, leaving all those issues aside, it’s a great book. It’s not exactly a comedy, but Stimson can be very witty when she wants to be, and has a wonderful way of leading into tragedy or horror with a light-hearted scene that catches me out every time.

The structure of the book is unusual. Four of the six members of the ‘Infidelity Chain’ take it in turns to ‘write’ a chapter from their point of view. Not so unusual, but each round of chapters usually (although, confusingly, not always) takes place at more or less the same time, so a number of the conversations come two or more times, as we see the scene from the point of view of every protagonist who is present.

It’s a great idea, but I read quite quickly, and I tend to remember people’s conversations while I’m reading the book (if only my memory was as good in the rest of my life). So it did seem very repetitive, and not always illuminating. There were occasions where something that seemed offhand or hurtful suddenly seemed completely understandable once the story was re-told from a different point of view, but mostly I could see the conversation from everyone’s point of view the first time, so reading it all again didn’t really add anything. But it works really well a lot of the time, especially when Stimson hasn’t written out all the same conversations word for word.

The characters are great. Ella is probably the one you’d call the main character. Ella is a doctor, and she’s actually intelligent. She really is. Okay, so cheating on her husband probably isn’t her best demonstration of it, but you can tell she’s good at her job. Even when Ella starts to doubt her abilities and becomes a much more vulnerable character, I can still believe she’s been to and passed medical school.

But more than that, Ella is a married woman with an adorable husband called Jackson and is sleeping with a married man called William – and I like her. I like her a lot. I know there are plenty of lovely homewreckers in real life, but it’s more difficult to separate the crime from the person in fiction because you can’t stand in a room with the character and get to know them in your own way.

I really like the other characters too. Beth (William’s wife) is a very convincing depressive. The multiple-viewpoint style is most successful with Beth because life does look totally different when you’re depressed, so she always has something new to bring to the story.

At the same time, you do have some sympathy with William (if you can forget about the infidelity issue for the minute) as he’s a really lovely man, and even though it’s definitely possible to enjoy the company of a depressive, you can tell it does take a great deal of energy, and sometimes you feel so helpless, and in need of some time away from them. William’s daughter Cate is amazingly nice for an adolescent – I even got used to the bizarre spelling of her name once I realised it was short for Caitlin rather than an emulation of Cate Blanchett. (I always want to call her Sate Blanchett. Has anyone else done that?)

Not that I’m saying you should go out and try it, but infidelity has never been so romantic.

Visit this blog: Fairy Kisses

2008-11-22T16:52:00.002Z

Read this blog by the very talented Amy. Fairy Kisses is a beautifully-written blog which includes personal updates, articles on a number of subjects, and some great book reviews.

Amy's recent reviews include the 1006 film of Jane Eyre, Lucy Dawson's His Other Lover (which I'm hoping someone will buy me for Christmas) and Katie Price/Jordan's Crystal (Amy's review of this book is much more polite than mine!).

The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (Fiona Neill)***

2008-11-22T16:41:00.004Z

Lucy is the world’s most useless mother. She has rotten apples all over her car (ewwwww I’m not getting in there!) and she gives the guy she fancies (not the guy she’s married to) a drink of wee. She also has a habit of thinking of people by nicknames, which include Yummy Mummy No. 1 and Sexy Domesticated Dad, which does get quite annoying, although it’s probably true that Lucy isn’t really seeing them as individuals.

Interestingly (and annoyingly) the characters with labels come over much more strongly than some of the characters with names. Her friends, Emma and Cathy have very little character other than an overwhelming desire for illicit sex. On the positive side, this makes Lucy’s extra-marital dalliances seem a bit more forgiveable – after all, everyone’s doing it! But it is rather disappointing as some of Fiona Neill’s other characters are brilliant.

Lucy is absolutely terrifyingly incompetent, but her talents for getting out of messes almost equal her talents for getting into them, and she’s absolutely lovely. Even her attempts to have an affair have a kind of innocence about them. I don’t quite believe that she has a history degree – maybe if it was something more creative like Art, I’d believe it – but a history degree somehow doesn’t quite fit with the character, even as an amusing contrast between Lucy Then and Lucy Now.

Becky in Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series is totally dippy, but (not that I know her actual qualifications), I can believe she probably has A Levels, if not a degree – although probably not an academic one. I’m sure there are loads of people with history degrees who are incompetent, but it’s a surprising combination, and even in a comedy it’s not always effective to bring in too many surprising combinations, especially one that is really only a small part of the book and doesn’t really advance the plot.

Robert (Sexy Domesticated Dad) is incredibly sexy, which makes Lucy’s behaviour even more reasonable, and Isobel (Yummy Mummy No. 1) manages to seem really really nice, even though the book is told from the point of view of Lucy, who finds her apparent perfection threatening.

The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy is really funny, and the jokes keep going all the way through the book. You can see the twists coming a mile off, and some of the incidents in the book just wouldn't happen. But the twists actually worked well, and some of the unrealistic bits were so funny, I didn't much care how silly they were. In lots of ways, the book is more a series of episodes than a story, but that’s okay. Some of Lucy’s mistakes are too embarrassing to be funny – you do cringe for her quite a lot - but most of them are great. Is there are phrase in the English language more horrific than Yesterday’s Knickers? I don’t think there is.

Atonement (Ian McEwan)**

2008-11-20T22:18:00.003Z

I feel really bad about writing this because I’ve just met a really nice girl online and she loves Atonement. But I just can’t think of anything nice to say about it.

But I’ll try. Ian McEwan’s writing is very flowery, almost poetic, and he handles some challenging subjects. The middle section, about Robbie’s life as a soldier, is very interesting and shocking. His characters are all real individuals and I’ve never read another book like it.

But I hate this book. I really do. McEwan almost seems to be sneering at his characters from a distance. I can’t blame him for that, as I got quite sneery about them too, but there’s not much point in writing about characters if you don’t have the slightest bit of affection for them. It’s probably worse than writers that insist on telling you their characters are wonderful. I suppose it is possible to write about villains you dislike, but the best books are those where you even like the villains in a way. Hating a character isn’t that much fun really, but loving to hate a character is great. I don’t love to hate the characters in Atonement. I’d rather not think about them at all.

Some of the incidents in the book just didn’t ring true. Like there’s a bit where Robbie writes a horny letter to weird Cecelia, then writes a more decent one. He asks freaky Briony to deliver the letter, even though he’s going to see Cecelia himself, but mixes the letters up. I have read a different story with an incident like this, and it worked brilliantly, but that story had a strong element of comedy, and I really wanted the two characters to get it together. Atonement seems deathly serious, and I couldn’t stand Robbie or Cecelia. Robbie’s okay, I suppose, but Cecelia’s scary.

As for that stripping off by the fountain incident – as if! I accept that Cecelia doesn’t want to bother the kitchen staff by using the kitchen taps, but are there really no other taps in the house? I’m sure the house has bathrooms. Even if they don’t have running water, is there no garden tap Cecelia could use? And even if the fountain really is the only source of water, you don’t take all your clothes off and jump in. You’d have to be seriously deranged to do that. Any normal person would just lean over the fountain and hold the vase she wants to fill underneath the water. Actually, forget normal people, even I wouldn’t throw myself in. Not even if I wanted to impress some guy. If I want to impress someone, I don’t usually try to pretend to be even madder than I am. Even if I was in the mood for doing something silly, I’d go in with my clothes on. Much more fun that way.

Briony is the little bitch who causes all the trouble, and one positive thing I can say is that McEwan almost manages to make her crime reasonable. It’s still incredibly stupid, but the little brat obviously suffers from severe immaturity, and anyone a bit stupid with a mental age of 5 might make the mistake she did. She’s actually 13, so she really should have known not to be so evil. Or maybe the character could have been written in a more sympathetic manner. Briony is supposed to be very upset and hurt when she commits her crime, and a lot of readers will have been in a similar position, so it should be possible to understand her feelings. But she’s such a horrible little brat, and McEwan’s habit of distancing himself from his characters doesn’t help.

It’s not all Briony’s fault though. Anyone with parents like Leon and Emily probably didn’t have much chance of becoming reasonable human beings. Neither of them is very sane or very likeable. Some of the characters who feature in the Robbie section are interesting, but they’re hardly in it really,

Another really annoying thing about this book (which is apparently also true of at least one of his others) is that the story isn’t original. He stole it from an autobiography from the time where the book is set (he has denied this, but it looks a bit suspicious to me). Moral issues aside, I just find this a bit of a cheat. It’s okay to find outside inspiration. All writers do it. But you need to bring something to the book to make it your own, and writing a bizarre story that is half-copied, half-nonsensical, isn’t really enough for me.

But Atonement does seem to have made a lot of people really happy. And that is good.

The Hitman (Ricky Hatton)****

2008-09-19T15:03:00.002+01:00

Some autobiographies are great to read whether you’re interested in the subject or not. My whole family loved Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, even though only two of us are interested in football. The Hitman unfortunately might not be so universally appealing – although boxing fans will surely enjoy it. Even those that aren’t particular fans of Ricky should enjoy the boxing descriptions and the humour.

Ricky Hatton – or, more accurately, his ghost writer, Niall Hickman (although he has captured Ricky’s ‘voice’ really well) tells some great stories, from Ricky’s life in and out of the ring. Describing what happens in a boxing match isn’t easy, but Hatton/Hickman brings every fight to life. He also treats his opponents with extraordinary respect, whatever the result. So many celebrities see a biography as an opportunity to bad mouth pretty much anyone they can. Hatton is nice about everyone. Even when he doesn’t get on with someone, he is as tactful as he can be, and never ignores their positive points. It’s very refreshing.

Ricky also has a great sense of humour. Some of his stories are hilarious, all of them extremely well told. It’s easy to imagine this is exactly how Ricky would describe it, word for word. The style is chatty but readable. He’s very honest, and, although confident in his abilities, he’s surprisingly modest. He seems like a really lovely man who really appreciates his fans, enjoying their company at least as much as their support.

The chapters in the book are called ‘Rounds’, which is appropriate in theory, but the thing about rounds is that they imply chronological order. Although Hatton clearly does have chronology in mind, he has a remarkable tendency to get sidetracked. He’ll start talking about a fight he’s preparing for, but then he’ll start talking about something that happened to him when he was a child that starts off being relevant, but then you get further and further from the subject in hand. Then he might go on to talk about his life as an amateur boxer… it’s all very interesting, but it’s sometimes frustrating when you’re looking forward to hearing about a fight, and Hatton will give you one really tantalising detail – and then you have to wait for ages to find out the rest.

Hatton does tend to assume that the people reading his book will know what’s going to happen before they read the book. It was probably reasonable for him to make the assumption that his book is not that likely to be read by people who don’t know who he is. His fight history includes just one defeat, and I should think all his fans will remember who beat Ricky, and when.

But I read the same books over and over again, and even though I know exactly what’s going to happen, I still get really excited and worried about what might happen. I get all caught up in the moment, and start hoping and dreading that something will/won’t happen. It’s the same with Ricky’s boxing matches. Each one is so thrillingly described – but, every so often, he will remind you (although not in a conceited way) of the fact he won it, and that brings the excitement levels down.

But in the end, Hatton seems to worked this out: the latest update, which includes Hatton’s fight against Floyd Merryweather in December last year, is wonderfully-written. I knew the result very well: I’d seen the reports, and would have watched the match if I’d had Setanta Sports. But it’s so vividly written, I kind of forgot all that and just got caught up in what Hatton was describing. It’s a shame Hatton didn’t write the whole of the book like this. But that doesn’t stop The Hitman from being a very good book.

Angels (Marian Keyes)***

2008-09-14T19:17:00.005+01:00

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.

A Hidden Life (Adele Geras)****

2008-09-08T15:48:00.002+01:00

Adele Geras is a brilliant writer. Her style is both poetic and very gripping; she can be very funny, and A Hidden Life, like a lot of her stories, has some really great twists: the type that could fall flat but never do. Her characters are really lovely, and even some of the dodgy ones are quite appealing.

A Hidden Life also manages to get away with something I usually really don’t like writers to do. One of the characters is a writer, and A Hidden Life includes a number of excerpts from the character’s book. I usually don’t like this because my brain would rather not be keeping an eye on two such completely different storylines at the same time, and the fact that the second storyline is in a book immediately makes it seem unreal. And, as it is unreal, I’d usually prefer not to waste my time with it.

But Geras has a reason for doing this, and it’s a reason that works because she does manage to make it real. The book sections tell you something important about the character who wrote them, and they therefore become an important part of the book. Still, I don’t think it’s something authors should try too often.

All the main characters seemed a lot older than me, including the one who was supposed to be about my age. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I am quite immature anyway, so most characters would seem older than me, but I didn’t identify with the characters as much as I usually like to. The person my age, Lou, is a very nice girl, and her story is very interesting, but even though we have quite a lot in common, I don’t really identify with her. I love her name, though.

My favourite character is Vanessa – she seems fun, and I really like the way her relationship with Mickey (a girl) is described very simply without any fuss. Kissing girls is really no different from kissing boys except girls are better kissers, so there’s no need to make a big drama about it. Coming-out books are fine, and they probably are important and encouraging for people who are thinking of coming out themselves, but you can often learn more about same-sex relationships when they’re not part of the main story - because, most of the time, the fact you’re gay isn’t the most important factor in your life. Life is about how you relate to each other and to outside events, and A Hidden Life is mostly about outside events. While Vanessa is concerned about coming out to her family, her relationship is something for her to enjoy, and to derive comfort from – but not something for her to worry about especially. The main theme of any book is what the characters are most worried about.

It was disappointing in a way that Vanessa’s girlfriend had a male name because it does tend to make the girl-on-girl thing less obvious (NOT that I was getting turned on by it), but maybe it helps readers who might feel uncomfortable reading about lesbians if they can half-pretend she’s a man. They really did have a lovely relationship.

The men were a bit annoying, though. There was only about one man in the whole book who wasn’t unfaithful, and he never really got the chance to be because he only showed up about halfway through, and only got into a relationship later on. Still, in a way it kinds of makes you feel, no wonder Vanessa became a lesbian if that’s what all the men she knows are like. And I’d really prefer to think she is with her girlfriend because she really likes her rather than because there aren’t any decent men around.

But, as usual, Geras has created lots of really good characters, and it’s very easy to remember who’s who. I think I liked just about every character by the end. Phyl can be annoyingly pathetic, but I couldn’t help admiring her for not being even worse. Harry is absolutely adorable, a proper romantic-novel hero, and the fact he does have his imperfections makes him a lot more human than most romantic heroes. Even the people who aren’t actually alive when the book takes place are very powerful characters. A Hidden Life really is an intelligent and intriguing novel.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (Maggie O'Farrell)***

2008-08-23T20:30:00.001+01:00

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a fascinating book. It’s beautifully and rather poetically written, which seems to be quite unusual for books written in the present tense. These tend to be witty and snappy rather than poetic – although there are exceptions, such as Sophie Hannah’s Hurting Distance.

I wouldn’t call The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox chick lit. It’s probably aimed at an older audience, and there isn’t a lot of romance or humour in it. It’s not an easy book to classify. Perhaps it could be called a mystery story, but it’s certainly not a detective story. It’s frightening and horrific in places, but it probably doesn’t count as horror. There are some sad bits, but you guess quite early on that there is, at the very least, potential for a happy ending. In many ways, The Vanishing Act of Esmé Lennox is a historical novel, but I’ve always found that genre a bit too all-encompassing. Just about any story set in the past counts as historical, whether it is set fifty or fifty thousand years ago; whether it is a happy story or a sad one.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is strange, but compelling. True, parts of the book are quite boring, mostly the parts of the story about Esme’s great-niece Iris, but most of it was intriguing, and I wanted to know what had happened in the past, and how things were going to work out in the future.

But the book doesn’t quite seem finished. A lot of books stop at a really interesting point, leaving you wondering what’s going to happen next, and wishing it wasn’t the end, but so much of the story in this book seems to be missing. It’s quite frustrating to get to the end of the book with so many questions unanswered.

And it’s not just that the book ends prematurely – a lot of the middle of the story seems to be missing too. Although the book spans many years – we see Esme both as a child and as a very old lady – very little of the story is actually told directly. A lot of the time, Iris is listening to Esme telling her story. It’s all very interesting, but it might have been even more gripping if Maggie O’Farrell had shown more from Esme’s point of view and gone into more detail about what happened. There is so much she just touches on that I’d have liked to hear a lot more about. It’s not as though it would make the book too long: it’s actually rather short. There are only 244 pages, and not many words on a page.

Another thing that might have helped would be if Iris had had more of a story. I know the book only covers a very small part of her life, but it would have been good to get to know her as well as we know Esme. There is lots of room in the book for another storyline. All we really get to know about Iris is that she’s dating married Luke, and she once slept with her stepbrother Alex. It’s all very controversial stuff, but it actually makes a bit of an odd contrast with Esme’s story, and there’s no real feeling that the stories are intertwined. There’s no sense that the Esme problem and the boyfriend problem are in any way connected, or that one helps Iris to deal with the other.

But there is a lot I like about this book, and one of them is that, even though there are horrible things happening all over the place. O’Farrell has still created some very lovely characters. Esme, in particular, is very sweet, and her naughtiness is very easy to identify with. Iris is also lovely. Even some of the characters who cause horrible things to happen aren’t so much villains as badly mistaken, and the people who genuinely are nasty still seem like real people, rather than being exaggeratedly villains.