Cautionary tale with muffins

The Tu¯ ¯ı Has Landed by Jodie Shelley, The Copy Press, $30 .. ..

.. .. .. .. .. When best-selling Irish author Marian Keyes threw down the challenge to write 500 words beginning “The doughnuts had failed to deescalate the situation”, Jodie Shelley ran with it.

A student of Keyes via a series of Instagram Lives, the Aucklander opens her debut novel with the sentence “The muffins had failed to lighten the mood of the meeting.” It gave her a solid base for the story that follows. Central character Becky is at the meeting featuring the muffins. She supplied them despite knowing she was about to be fired from her job in retail. She’d been late for work once too often.

Nannying is her next shot at employment but she walks out of an early-morning trial run when the boys she’d hoped to look after ambush her, tying her up in a combat net. Their arrogant banker dad takes their side, convincing Becky it wasn’t the easy gig she’d anticipated. But his live-in girlfriend Anahira is devastated, ends their relationship and bonds with Becky and her friends. From there on the storyline follows many paths but the core is the quest to get Anahira’s koro’s wedding ring back. She’d entrusted it to her ex.

What lifts this chick-lit rom-com out of the predictable is the way Shelley treats a seemingly unconnected subject — problem gambling.

Millennials are undoubtedly Shelley’s target market but it won’t do their Nanas any harm to read it too; if only to discover how dissimilar their 20-something years were. —