#38 The Undomestic Goddess

Sophie Kinsella's latest book, The Undomestic Goddess lives up to every cliche that could ever be said about those kinds of books. It's chicklit to the core, complete with the proto-feminist workaholic right down to the hunky gardener that Samantha Sweeting, the protagonist, falls in love with.

Her writing reads so well, and Kinsella has a great gift for creating fabulous female characters. But maybe she suffers from the fact that she's so successful rather than perhaps benefiting from it. What she needs is a really good editor (I call this the Margaret Atwood Dilemma) who isn't afraid to say, "This plot needs some work," not "your book is so fabulously wonderful and will make us all a pile of money," which it will, but still, perhaps not the point?

There are so many holes in the plot of this book (high powered lawyer makes a huge mistake, causes her a partnership in London's best firm, lawyer runs away and ends up as a housekeeper...and then falls in love) that it sort of ruined the book for me. And I'm not talking about the see-through nature of most of these books, how easy it is to see what's going to happen from half-way into the first paragraph, it's seemingly more than that in this case.

Kinsella brings in characters only to drop them, never to be heard from again. She creates these energetic scenes and then can't write through them well enough not to rely on the cliches that seem to pepper every other paragraph. She creates these heart-stopping situations (something about a poor legal contract that her new employers are about to sign) and then never talks about it again leaving me wondering what the hell happened, and then she's off on the next tangent, rolling into the inevitable conclusion right down to the pap of an ending that involves, ahem, a train and someone, ahem, chasing after someone else. Ew.

It would be nice to say the she's maturing through her novels, this being, what the fifth or sixth? But what seems to happen is that her books seem to be getting more and more derivative. Yeah, the whole lawyer-goes-slumming chicklit plot was already done by Jennifer Weiner's In Her Shoes, which is by far the better book.

Now, I read this book in about three hours, what does that say about me, and about The Undomestic Goddess? Visit your local library for chicklit, don't waste your precious book buying dollars. Or start a chicklit club, and each girl buys one book and then trades. Because they are like sugar, probably not very good for you but impossible not to eat when you've got that craving.