The Other Woman's Shoes (Adele Parks)*

Adele Parks is a very popular and successful writer so I was really expecting to enjoy this book. And, to be fair, I did enjoy the first page and a half. I absolutely loved the opening line. It wasn’t an especially witty or original or exciting line but it did mention the words ‘Earl’s Court station’ so naturally I was hooked.

I also quite liked the central character, Martha. True, she wasn’t enjoying being at the tube station, which immediately shows you she’s a completely different person from me but I could identify with the not liking stairs part. Also, getting stressed over going to the hairdresser's is exactly the sort of thing I’d get stressed over (if I ever went to the hairdresser’s) and I can definitely relate to not wanting to create a scene. Unfortunately with me, scenes get created all by themselves but I can understand Martha’s not wanting it.

The blurb tells you that sisters Martha and Eliza have split up from their partners and Martha wants fun and Eliza wants a husband. But I don’t think the blurb should have told you that. The blurb should really tell you about something that happens near the beginning of the book. The blurb is your taster, the thing you’re waiting for when you start to read the book. You don’t really want to be waiting half the book for it to happen.

It’s not until about halfway through that the blurb becomes even slightly true. Martha has no interest in fun for ages and even when she is she’s more interested in the provider of the fun than the enjoyment itself. As for Eliza, she never really at any point wants a husband. She does trawl through Martha’s address book in search of a suitable man but it seems to me that all she really wants is a shag.

But that’s a problem with the blurb and Parks probably isn’t responsible for that – although if there was enough excitement in the story leading up to these events, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered what the blurb said.

One of the most important things for me in a book is the characters. I want to like them. At the very least, I want to be rooting for them. But that didn’t really happen. Martha got on my nerves so much and some of the things she does made me cringe with embarrassment. Usually, I don’t even notice when someone has done something embarrassing but seriously, I just wanted to shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see what the crazy woman was going to do next. I’d be lying if I said I’d never done anything embarrassing, everyone does it sometimes but Martha is (I hope) so much worse than me.

Martha is also completely self-obsessed. I accept that when your husband leaves you it’s probably a bit of a shock and you might well spend months weeping and wailing but after a while I stopped feeling sympathetic and I just wanted one of the other characters to shake her. The problem isn’t so much that she’s upset, that’s natural (although I’m sure she’s milking it at least a little bit) but Martha isn’t just upset, she stops showing even the smallest amount of consideration for anyone else.

I don’t usually mind when characters have emotional breakdowns. I actually rather like it. The feeling of being drawn into someone’s crisis can (at least when it’s fiction) makes very enthralling (if not strictly enjoyable) reading. I don’t mind too much when it happens in real life either. Most of the people I know have tried to kill themselves and I don’t get annoyed about that. With Martha, it just seems like self-indulgence and attention-seeking. There is no real sense of sadness in Martha’s words or actions – my sympathy was for the poor people who have to put up with her.

Even when Martha meets Jack and starts having wild sex with him, she doesn’t change. She’s still needy and demanding. I don’t blame Eliza for being convinced that Jack’s just with her for the sex. The way she behaves with Jack is so embarrassing at times, it actually hurts (I don’t see what was wrong with the Crunchie though) but it’s the way she treats Eliza that really bothers me.

Eliza, like Martha, has just lost a long-term partner, Greg. But whilst Michael has (perhaps understandably!) walked out on Martha, Eliza has taken the decision to leave herself. So she goes to her sister Martha’s house, discovers Michael has walked out and has to spend the next few months looking after Martha and her children. Martha doesn’t even consider that Eliza might be upset too and Eliza just has to push her own feelings aside and pretend everything’s fine.

Just because Eliza wanted to leave, it doesn’t mean she’s not going to be hurting. She probably did love Greg at one stage, even if she doesn’t now so she’s still lost someone she loved. And even if she’s completely happy to have left him, her life will still have changed quite a lot. That must be a lot to cope with even if you don’t have to start babysitting your sister, not to mention your niece and nephew. Maybe Martha’s problems serve as a timely distraction for Eliza but Martha really doesn’t give her much choice in the matter. Martha comes first and it seems as though she feels Eliza’s problems don’t matter. (She does kind of realise quite near the end that maybe she’s been a bit selfish but it’s a bit late by then.)

Eliza isn’t as bad as Martha. She does seem to be a very kind and patient person. But to a great extent, she’s hardly in the book. You don’t get much sense of her personality except what other people tell you. Eliza is just Martha’s live-in babysitter with almost no life of her own. Either she’s comforting Martha or she’s trying to shag one of Martha’s friends. It’s not much of a storyline.

I do like Martha’s boyfriend Jack though. He seems like a really nice, kind guy but at the same time he isn’t a total drip. Which is a shame in a way because I do like my drips but it’s not me who has to sleep with him. I can believe a lot of women would love him as he is. He’s a bit of an unrealistic character but it’s not completely impossible there are men in the world like him. Unlike Eliza, I got the impression he actually like Martha as a person – although fuck knows why.

Then there’s the dialogue. When something bad happens in real life, I think a lot of people start talking in clichés because they’re really struggling to put their thoughts into words. But when people start talking in clichés in a book or on TV it can just end up being really funny and that spoils the atmosphere a bit. Parks’ dialogue reads like EastEnders. To begin with, I didn’t mind it so much as it was making me laugh but after a while it stopped being funny and just became annoying.

The dialogue wasn’t the biggest problem though - a lot of the time there wasn’t any dialogue. Sometimes Parks will just tell you what happened without getting into all the details of what could have been a very interesting conversation. There are also a lot of anecdotes about past events which is fine in moderation but when it happens a lot, it gets in the way of the story. She’s also one of those writers who tells you what you’re supposed to think of each character. I’d rather make up my own mind really but to be fair she does say some things I agree with. I don’t agree that Martha is a wonderful, lovely, giving, kind person but I can’t argue when Parks says she’s being embarrassing.

The book also seemed to try a bit too hard to mislead the readers. It’s fine to disguise a situation a bit, for the author to describe in a way that makes you think one thing when the truth it something different. But Parks doesn’t just hint, she tells you fairly directly what’s going on, only to contradict herself later on. Sometimes I actually found I was reading back, wondering if I was going mad or something. Instead of thinking ‘oh, of course that’s how it is’ I was thinking ‘That’s not what you said before, look’.

I won’t say too much about the ending. Not that I especially want to encourage anyone to read this book but all I’ll say is that if I’d liked the characters, the ending Parks chose would have been the ending I wanted most. But that doesn’t make it the right one. In the short-term, it’s satisfying but in the long-term, I think they’re heading for divorce.

But finally, I must say something about the title. It implies a sort of role-swap for Martha and Eliza but that is another thing that never really takes place. Martha starts going out clubbing (yes, at her age!) but this isn’t so much Martha turning into Eliza as Martha trying to be her teenage self. Eliza does end up doing some of Martha’s motherly duties but that’s only because they’re pretty much forced on her.

I’m sure there are some good things about this book but the only times I weren’t bored were when I was really annoyed.