This review contains spoilers.
I’m a fan of Kinsella’s Shopaholic series and her stand alone, Can You Keep A Secret. Her other stand alone novels I have been very disappointed with. Sad to say, I felt the same about Twenties Girl.
My main problem: I had no liking for the main characters, Lara, and the ghost of her Great Aunt, Sadie. I thought Lara was extremely weak and had no backbone to speak of. To be blunt, she was a complete ninny!
Lara leaves her job and takes all of her bank savings, and enters into a new Head Hunting firm with her best friend Natalie, who is a ‘headhunter’, without doing thorough research or background checks on Natalie. I admit, you instinctively believe what your BF tells you, but you don’t just enter blindly into a new business venture without checking the details for yourself. Especially after putting all of your live savings into it. That stuck me as extremely stupid.
So, Natalie ups and leaves to go abroad, leaving Lara who is inexperienced to run the firm. The firm is floundering and Lara doesn’t try and go after Natalie, she just bumbles along with no experience with disastrous results.
The other main character is Sadie, who is a ghost. Sadie appears at her own funeral, where only Lara can see her which is never explained. Yup, this is a story that is sort of paranormal, but is very much chick lit. IMO, a recipe for disaster as there are no explanations regarding how Sadie came to be. In a way, I wish Sadie never came to be. She was ‘unbelievably’ annoying in this book.
Between her and Lara, I had to put the book down numerous times in sheer exasperation. Sadie acted like a petulant child where she mostly screamed in Lara’s face, ordering Lara to do her actions for her. I felt as if I were reading about two children in this book.
Lara was very child-like regarding her ex-boyfriend. He clearly didn’t want her, yet Lara spied on him, stalked him and blindly swore that he still loved her. I felt embarrassed just reading about her feelings and reactions towards him. Where was her self respect? It gets worse though. Lara conspires to get back with Josh, her ex-boyfriend, by telling Sadie to use her powers on Josh. Oh yes, Sadie has special powers where she is able to command people to do exactly what she says by shouting and screaming in their ears. Sadie does what Lara wishes, and they get back together. Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!
While we have Lara finding the necklace, acting bat shit crazy over her ex boyfriend and trying to keep the business afloat, we have another sub-plot regarding the actual hero of the story, Ed, who I thought was kinda boring but nice. And even that avenue was annoying. Lara is only dating him because Sadie wants to. Yup, that’s right. Lara is dating Ed, so Sadie can pretend that she’s dating him. And Lara must say and do exactly what Sadie does as it’s Sadie’s man. *rolls eyes* And the only reason that Ed starts to date Lara in the first place is because Sadie makes him.
All of these sub-plots come head to head towards the end, but I was just glad the book was finishing. I may sound harsh, but I’m just disappointed with the whole slew of characters and their personalities.
In the end, we do find out the reason why the necklace was so important to Sadie and I admit, I did find it very sad and heart warming. This is the only time that Lara really starts to shine. I just wished she was like this from the beginning.
If you want a strong heroine, don’t read this book. If you want to read about a heroine who only gets a backbone in the last four chapters of the book, then read this book. If you want to read about a ghost who is extremely annoying, then read this book.