This
is a story of a girl who doesn’t believe in happy endings. Or happy families.
It’s the story of Eleanor Bee, a shy book-loving girl who vows to turn herself
into someone bright, shiny and confident, someone sophisticated. Someone who
knows how life works. But life has a funny way of catching us unawares. Turns
out that Elle doesn’t know everything about love. Or life. Or how to keep the
ones we love safe …
I started off actually liking this well
enough, as the set-up was very powerful. I particularly enjoyed Elle’s
difficult relationship with her brother – that scene at the start when they’re
children is simply brilliant. Sadly, we don’t stay in this childhood moment as
we’re quickly tumbled into Elle as a young woman trying to make her way in the
publishing world.
Entirely due to the great start, I was
prepared to give Elle the benefit of the doubt and kept my determination going
for a good 100 pages or so. Gradually it dawned on me that, no matter how much
I tried to deny it as a reader, Elle is simply a doormat, and a dull one to
boot. Sorry, but she just is. Yes, I know she’s a borderline alcoholic with an
alcoholic mother, and surely medically depressed, but every time there’s a
crisis she simply just keels over and agrees with whoever the strongest person
in any particular scene is. I have to say it’s never her. If you want
interesting depressive and/or alcoholic women in your fiction, you’re better
off with Marian Keyes. However, there was one moment when I got rather excited
because Elle was about to launch into a very justified row with her bitchy
boss, but the moment said boss challenges her, Ellie gives in and just agrees.
Sigh …
There’s also an allegedly torrid affair
between her and another boss, Rory, whom she’s obsessive about but really I
just didn’t believe anyone would be interested enough in her to bother. That
goes for the on-off relationship with an ex-colleague too – and the moment when
she realises (no serious spoilers here) that he’s fathered a child by someone
else has to be one of the great clichés of romantic fiction – so clichéd that I
couldn’t help but laugh uproariously. Sorry …
Then the storyline jumps again and we’re a
few years on and she’s living and working in New York. Sadly she’s not any more
interesting than she was in the UK and for the rest of the book, I did even
more sighing. The relationships she has with the two possible men she’s
supposed to be with are worryingly unrealistic, and indeed neither man is very
nice or even interesting. As a result, the ending is nonsensical. Or would have
been if I’d cared enough about what happens to her. If the novel had lost 150
pages or so, it might have been better as Elle wouldn’t have been so intensely
boring and irritating. That said, the book covers she’s responsible for in her
publishing job sound nice – maybe these pictures should have been included in
the novel as they would certainly have been more riveting
than our heroine. Oh well.
Verdict: 2 stars. Decent enough plot, but a
too dim and unlikeable heroine
No comments:
Post a Comment