Book Review - Remember Me?: A Novel by Sophie Kinsella

Sophie Kinsella takes a stab at writing an amnesia fic with Remember Me?: A Novel and I thought she did a pretty good job of making a cliche'd plot seem fresh.

Lexi Smart, ordinary girl with a loser boyfriend and bad hair days, wakes up to find that she has magically become a different person. She discovers that it is not 2004 as she thinks, and that she has no memory of the past three years. Lexi has somehow woken up to the life she has always dreamed of - she's rich, she's a successful businesswoman, she's thin & gorgeous (!) with perfect hair, teeth and clothes, and get this, a freakin' gorgeous hunk of a millionaire husband Eric. Like, wowza! If only we all woke up to that fairytale too, huh?

Pretty soon though, Lexi discovers that things are not as rosy as they appear. She can't quite strike up a romantic spark with her new husband, none of her old friends like her in the present time, and her new-self is this cold-hearted, cut-throat person known for being a holy terror of a boss.

Lexi can't get a handle on her new life and job, and on top of everything, she finds herself attracted to her husband's friend & business colleague Jon. Imagine her shock when Jon tells Lexi that they were having an affair and that she was about to leave her husband for him before she got amnesia!

What a terribly muddled turn of events, right? Yes, the amnesia schtick is overused, but Sophie Kinsella manages to coax a funny, fresh and ultimately, heartwarming and love-affirming story out of it. You will cheer Lexi on as she tries to rediscover herself and reconcile who she was with who she had become.

Check out Remember Me?: A Novel by Sophie Kinsella on Amazon!

Book Review - The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella

I skipped over Sophie Kinsella's 'Can You Keep A Secret?' since I couldn't make myself finish it. Just too horrid of a book.

Anyway, bearing in mind that I really really liked 'Confessions of a Shopaholic', I decided to take a chance on 'The Undomestic Goddess'.

Samantha Sweeting, Sophie Kinsella's new heroine, is thankfully about 180 degrees NOT a Becky Bloomwood clone. Samantha is pushing thirty, and is a very driven workaholic lawyer at the London-based law firm Carter Spink. She is also just about to achieve the dream of a lifetime - she may just be the firm's newest partner!

Alas, in one horrible day, Samantha's entire carefully constructed life collapses around her. She discovers that she has made an awful awful mistake at work that could cost a client more money than God, and Samantha goes into nervous breakdown and runs to the boondocks to hide.

This is where the entire premise of the novel goes haywire, and Sophie Kinsella asks her readers to set aside all sense of reality and just go with the flow... Somehow, Samantha finds herself employed as a housekeeper out in the English countryside by the noveau rich Geigers. Samantha (who does not have the first idea on running a household and household chores) then deals with absurd situation after absurd household situation, and at the same time, falls in love with the local gardener Nathaniel.

Yeah, like I can believe that a hard-driving attorney would be happy scrubbing toilets ;-) Samantha has to deal with her old life eventually, though, so how will she be able to connect her new self with all her old problems? And what about Nathaniel? Read the book to find out!

This book is not even in the same universe of quality of Chick-lit as 'Confessions of a Shopaholic', but it is still a fun humorous read, as long as you are willing to suspend all sense of reality while reading.

Check out The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella on Amazon!