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

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.