The Stepmother (Carrie Adams)**

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.