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

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)*****

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)**

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)****

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

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)**

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)****

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.