Just Good Friends? [Paperback]

I bought this book because it had one of the highest customer review ratings, and I'm sooo disapointed.

My first thoughts were that there were too many characters, and for the first (pretty much) half of the book they (the men mostly) have the same storyline, so it was confusing and pointless.
I was also frequently annoyed at being told what to think, there is a lot of 'he did... (something bad, or didn't notice something)' well he is a man after all... Noooo... not all men are like that, stop telling me he did it because he was male!!

I agree with the other 1 star rater about the wine references.

and at first all the 'wha3/4' really confused me... I was quite a way through the book before it stopped annoying me so much.

And well... I couldn't be bothered to read the end of the book because they were all happy and it was telling me a lot of stuff I didn't really care about. (infact I don't think I really cared about any of the characters, there was just so many of them and the least tedious one was Katie (the nanny).

and I think I must have skipped over the twist?

Anyway, I thought it was rubbish...

I wasn't going to write this review, but think there needs to be a bit of balance with all the gushing 5 stars out there. I love chick lit, I love light, flimsy storylines, I can suspend a huge amount of disbelief, I like a good love story, especially a lesbian one, I am hugely forgiving about grammar and the lack of a tight narrative. Plus I was interested in this book because it is set in a part of London I know, with a set of characters I vaguely know and tend to dislike and wouldn't mind reading about their undoing/ personal journeys. So I honestly came to this open-minded. But this is a first novel (and well done to Jane Reynolds for the guts to do it, I certainly haven't), but it reads like a self-published first novel. The character depiction is horribly clumsy. For example, at first the idea of emphasising the characters' wealth/ class by the kind of wine they like is quite clever. But to continue throughout the book to say whether it's a NZ Sauvignon Blanc they are enjoying or one of so-and-so's best Chablis.... it's like being bludgeoned around the head with said bottle of wine. Yes, we get it, they are rich, they drink non-stop, they know good wine from bad, they have champagne on a Friday night where we might crack open some Pinot Grigio.... Enough! And then for both plot and character development (and perhaps word count...) the author finds it necessary to show each feeling or decision first through the character's own thoughts, then through a conversation with someone else, then through the children's point of view, then through another conversation... it's really heavy-handed and insulting and makes an interesting development really boring. And it means the plot twist at the end (which isn't a bad idea, though not perhaps as wonderful as some of the other reviewers think) is reworked from all different angles until it has entirely lost its magic. Rather than a nifty plot twist, a couple of loose ends being tied up, and voila! a sense of resolution and surprise, you have a about 20% of the book being from the plot twist, making sure that we know exactly what each and every character ends up doing/ feeling/ thinking. The queen bee/ bitch has an unbelievable personality change; the overnight happy endings are forced, there is no sense of life being difficult or things NOT working out for the best; suddenly the characteristics of these rich, lazy women are reassessed as being quite worthy and 'doing their job' of being hard-working corporate wives; everyone forgives everyone. Even the cleaner lives happily ever after... There is no sense of struggle or development, just epiphany, which is not rewarding for the reader when it happens to EVERYONE in the book. There are also some strange linguistic traits which I guess are usual for self-published novels but are distracting and irritating in the end (I thought the whole cast was from Scotland as they all say 'aye?' at the end of sentences, rather than 'eh?'; there are lots of odd-looking hyphens in phrases like 'sort-of'; and there are way too many parentheses where the author adds unnecesssary detail again to hammer home what is going on eg 'Scrappy jumped up (keen to share the happy mood)' - either a detail should be in because it's important, or left out because it is repetitive.) Basically this plot idea - which came to the author in a dream apparently - is good. But it's over-worked and under-edited. I will not be reading the sequel.

I found it hard to put this book down. Great characters, fine food, brilliant drama, oh and very sexy! Finally a novel that covers diverse relationships, you've got relationships between husband and wife and the ever increasing situation where a woman falls for another woman. Great stuff. Buy it you won't be disappointed.