#7 - The Goddess Rules

With the doctors, disease and robbery all happening at breakneck speeds this week, it's a wonder I could concentrate at all. I have been reading Peter Ackroyd's mini-biography of Chaucer, which I'm loving, but I took a break from it to finish another one of my British chicklit books called The Goddess Rules (by Clare Naylor).

The cover is incredibly cheesy (think Harlequin in the 1970s) and belies the totally addictive, sweetly irresistible story on the inside. The main character, Kate Disney, is an artist who paints pet portraits for a living. She lives in a garden shed (honestly) in the backyard of an antique dealer (an old friend of the family). Her life is in shambles (bad egg of a boyfriend, good career but does she really want to be painting pets for the rest of her life, and what about the shed?), and until an old, reclusive movie star named Mirri comes to stay at the main house, that has no chance of changing.

Of course the main character goes through the requisite 'must-stay-with-the-bad-boyfriend' plot before she ends up with 'the one', but it's a pretty good little read. More romance-like than true chicklit, it was a bit saccharine for me at times and I rolled my eyes a lot, especially at the opening paragraph which was just so cliched that I almost put the book down. In the end, it was what I needed on a weekend after a week spent with super doctors and bad-ass robbers.