This novel does not drag and it is generally fun to read: it starts a little slowly and depressingly but it quickly takes off and it is not difficult to reach the last page. This means automatically three stars.
There are so many flaws, though, that I found it impossible to award more.
I guess the general aim here was to write something "bitchy" (or "Dick Lit" as they say in the blurb): a novel to make fun of the music environment, of everyday life of everyday people, of the French police but without disguising the harsh brutality of the world. To do so is brave because the author has to thread a very thin line avoiding both the grotesque and the tragic.
In many pages that balance is achieved and fun is on, but elsewhere it is not and the tone is just off.
The mystery which is nominally at the centre of the plot is hardly explored and the tension is sketchy at best.
Despite their having already lost a friend, there are too many moments when the characters seem a little too absent minded for someone stalked in a deadly way.
The rise to glittery stardom of this bitchy boy group is dealt cursorily: I am not in the music business and yet many details look off even to me: I seriously doubt the music industry would address the creation of a new boy band so carelessly. True, "Salty sticks" is new to the business -and that adds enormously to the satire- but I do not really think a band managed like that would go beyond a gig in a local pub. A minimum of plausibility should have been upheld.
Setting is -also nominally- Paris and we are treated to descriptions clearly written by someone who has visited the city, but these descriptions hardly fit the story and seem just glued there. The birth of this boyband should happen in London, which would also explain how most of the first names given to the charactes are English (Andrew, Ian, Brad, Donovan, etc.).
There are some inconsistencies in the plot but what chafes most is how the characters are not fully developped.
Once again I suppose the aim is to show how people who have nearly lost any hope can follow a dream and be successful. In characterization that thin balance is simply not achieved.
Simon is someone in his late twenties (a bit too old for a boy band?); he has an big emotional baggage, a dead-(very dead)-end job and spends his free time drinking and doing drugs just to feel bad and whiny the day after. Sometimes he is desperate, sometimes incredibly shallow other times he is bordering on the nerd.
It is as if the tone were constantly shifting between gritty realism, queen drama, personal baggage and dreams of success. A finer touch in dialogues and monologues would have been needed to shift seemlessly from one state to the other, to make me believe this is one and the same character and not a schizoid.
The same can be said for the other characters (who sometimes conquer the POV) but even more so as they are quite out of focus.
What drives them? What makes them choose who they are going to date -and believe me, there is a lot of coming together in this book-? What attracts them in the first place?
Simon finds love(s) as well but I never really understood WHY he was attracted to those particular people.
Either you drive out all the serious stuff from the novel and concentrate on the "bitchy" parts to embark on a fun bumpy ride or you give fully rounded, convincing, emotional background. As it is this novel is fun but quite on the simplistic side.
