Those of you who are avid readers of my blog (I imagine that number is precisely one, that one being myself) will know that the last book I read was Two Brothers by Ben Elton, a fairly dark novel which left me feeling a little low. Therefore for the next book for me to read on the commute I wanted something light. Something easy to read where I was fairly certain nobody was going to die. I had a little peak at the book shelf in front of me at work and saw a rather happy and cheerfully yellow and green looking book called Dear Thing. It seemed chick-litty and its GoodReads score was fairly high so I thought it would be just the ticket. I deposited my manliness in a corner next to some raw steak and had a read.
This book, surprise surprise, is about a love triangle. First we have Ben who is the Husband. He’s a hardworking architect/surveyor/building-stuff guy who has wanted to be a father since forever. He is caring and sharing and generally a stand-up guy. The Wife, Claire, is a baby-crazed yet sadly infertile woman who seems to spend the entire book brooding and baking things. She is a music teacher at a local posh school and is mostly homely and mumsy (can you be mumsy if you aren’t a mum?) Finally we have the Friend/Rival. She is called Romily (stupid name) and has a young daughter called Posie (stupid name). She is best friends (and secretly in love) with Ben/the Husband and offers to be a surrogate for Claire. This goes about as well as it sounds really. The Wife has trouble getting over the shame that she feels for not being able to give birth to the child that she so desperately wants. The Husband is torn between the feelings he has for his wife but also the birth-mother of his child. The Friend/Rival is equally torn between her conscience and her love for the Husband. The Friend/Rival’s daughter adds a lot of humour and stress to the mix, especially when her father turns up!
I have railed before about how certain kinds of books (Young Adult for example) get automatically criticised or looked down upon because of their genre. People seem to think that just because you don’t need to take a breather every 10 pages or so while reading that that must mean the book is no good. I call it the Dan Brown Effect. A Chick Lit book generally has a fairly set and formulaic structure, which of course is part of the appeal. You pick it up knowing vaguely what to expect and read it without having to engage too many parts of your brain. This does not mean, of course, that they can’t be good. Bridget Jones Diary of course is a classic example of a Chick Lit book that crossed over into being a ‘good’ book, but generally these kinds of books are maligned as being vapid and silly; not something for ‘real booklovers’ to admit to reading; the sort of thing that you put on your guilty pleasure list. I hate those people. I hate their pretentious voices and their crass words. Something that is readable and fun can OF COURSE be good.
Dear Thing is perhaps a little too formulaic for my tastes. The story pans out almost exactly how one would expect, which I guess is the point but at least an attempt at some sort of twist would have been niceThe author Julie Cohen is quite engaging but she suffers a little from what I call the Clancy Problem. Like the late Tom Clancy, she has clearly done a heck of a lot of research into pregnancy, surrogacy and motherhood and therefore she wants the fruits of her labours to be out there for all to see. This means that you often get rather needless sections about breast milk and the like which don’t really move the plot along or really add anything other than the author having a knowledge-gasm.
Having said all of that, I did enjoy this book. It took a little while to get going, but the second half of the book was truly excellent. The characters began to come alive and the action really grabbed hold. The major sign of how much that happened was that I was about 70 or so pages from the end when the train I was on reached my local station. I was so engrossed that I couldn’t just put the book in my bag and walk home not knowing how it all panned out, so I read it as I walked. Not many books can make me do that, so Bravo Mrs Cohen, Bravo.
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