Like I said when I reviewed Lizzy Harrison Loses Control, chick-lit and I stopped being easy bedfellows a few years back, and this title is a bit off-the-wall cheesy. Still, like many of my recent reads, this only cost me £2 brand new, so it was worth a gamble. At the very least I knew it would be easy to read.
Basic premise: 4 girls are school friends, then they drift apart (the 'childish prank' that goes wrong described in the blurb is way more boring than I expected in light of having read Torn). They have a brief reunion and then split their ways again, more distant than ever, until somebody gets back in touch. Admittedly this to-ing and fro-ing is not normal chick-lit stuff. The complete lack of drama, at least 'on stage', is, until the last fifty pages, incredibly unusual. Yes, there are affairs and divorces and fights, but it all seems to have happened before the story started. Then when there's a big showdown in the last few pages, it all seems very pantomime. Weird.
Character-wise, there's a big effort made to make the four women very different. Jen seems to be the main protagonist as it's from her perspective most of the novel is told from. She's likeable enough, if a bit of a wet lettuce, and her relationship with her daughter is virtually non-existant. Meg's relationship with her son is more believable and she is a bit more of an interesting character, although her storyline is odd. Georgina is again perhaps more believable if erratic. Rowan... well, you hardly see enough of her to get much of a sense of her and the story is never seen from her viewpoint.
With regard to the men involved, I'm not sure if we're supposed to be attracted to all of them. From my viewpoint, Jen's (ex) husband Ollie is the only one worth any time whatsoever: Aiden and Tom gave off vibes of being weird way before they were revealed to be. This makes the ending a strange mixture of pleasing, predictable and completely random. Not as random as Jen's final pages confession of her traumatic teenage past, but still quite convenient. The novel is tied up surprisingly quickly, as if the authors wanted it finished.
Yes, authors. Ellie Campbell is apparently a pseudonym for Pam Burks and Lorraine Campbell, sisters who write novels together. There is nothing especially interesting about this, although it is unusual, but it was very confusing when reading the acknowledgements as they referred to 'we' and 'our' throughout - even mentioning two husbands! Why go to the effort of pretending to be one person if you're going to give up in the dying pages?
Final summing up: a reasonable enough way to spend some time, won't set the world on fire, try not to laugh at the ending.
PS: I'm glad they did choose the name Ellie Campbell, though, as it means it's totally legitimate to post this video. Classic tune.
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