Shopaholic & Sister (Sophie Kinsella)***

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.