Unhappily ever after
What’s left in a romance novel when you’re not invested in the leading lady?
Jill Mansell writes books that are meant to make women feel good. Romantic fiction. Stories about love and life, stories that lift us up and lighten our days. I set aside her latest, saving it to read during a week I knew might be quite shite.
For a while, it worked. We meet stylish older lady Zillah, smart, spry and kind. We meet Conor, a photographer sensitive enough to be entranced by a woman who picks out a few ballet steps beside a busker on a snowy street. We meet the zany bestie. Then we meet our heroine, Essie. And in her first scene she comes out with this: “Arabella’s a slutty minx whose favourite hobby is sleeping with other women’s husbands.”
It’s cruelty. Petty, unprompted and deeply sexist. Whoosh, there went any interest I had in Essie finding her happily ever after. And whoosh, with it the faith I had in Mansell. There’s little light left
in a romance novel when you’re not invested in the leading lady and when the author is painfully out of touch.
For Essie’s outburst is not an isolated incident. A lovely, sunny woman who cheats (once) gets her comeuppance in the most biblical of ways. A bloke who fancies a woman – yet is not keen to ask her out – asks her not to sleep with her ex, telling himself it’s “good old-fash-
Message: female sexuality is a bit icky and it’s a thing that can be used up. Worse, it will turn decent men off. Contain at all costs.
ioned advice”. He admires a different woman for not going on a single date in four years. Message: female sexuality is a bit icky and it’s a thing that can be used up. Worse, it will turn decent men off. Contain at all costs.
Mansell is not a strong enough writer to make up for this. She uses redundant words – “currently” – recaps frequently and unnecessarily and tacks explanations on to the end of too many otherwise-funny exchanges.
She drops her characters into emotional turmoil without doing any donkey work to make that turmoil stack up. “It really was time to stop thinking about Paul,” Essie chides herself, when she has barely thought about him (Paul’s her ex) and has spent the previous few chapters obsessed with a new guy.
That new guy comes with his own set of cringes. His big emotional reveal to Essie is rendered laughable, his motivation for misleading her at their meet-cute utterly overblown and ludicrous.
On balance? A book that reads like it was phoned in, about a woman who is hard to like, underpinned by sexism that has well and truly had its day.
In bookshops Mansell keeps company with the likes of Marian Keyes, Cathy Kelly, Lauren Weisberger and Danielle Hawkins. I can’t imagine choosing this book over any of theirs, unless I were about to get on a plane – in which case my anti-anxiety drugs would make me forget it five minutes later.