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

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.