The story is about a twenty-something woman, Katie, who lives in a grotty flat-share in London and has a badly-paid job in marketing and it's all a bit depressing, except that ever since she was a kid growing up in Somerset, living in London is all she's ever wanted, so it has to be good. Right?
The underlying moral of the story is that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Not exactly profound, but not a bad moral. There are some really funny bits to it and if you overlook the bit where there is zero diversity and the author makes some quite disparaging generalisations about people from Somerset then there is some really engaging characterisation too.
The only thing I didn't really like about this book was the romance, which for a chick lit book is a bit of a problem. The lead man is nice enough, except his main function seems to be to rescue Katie from her humdrum existence and this leads to literally the cheesiest ending to a book that I've read in quite some time. Honestly, I prefer to see women rescuing themselves and making their own lives better rather than relying on someone else to do it for them. I'm all for romance, but it's a bit sad when one person's happiness depends on the other person facilitating it for them.
So all in all this was an okay book. I can see why Sophie Kinsella has made an absolute mint in churning out books like this. Haute literature it ain't, but it can be pretty good fun.
3 stars