Lindsay Kelk
It’s the fifth book in the series, and I still really enjoyed reading about Angela’s misadventures. She and Alex are still engaged, and she seems to be getting everything together in this book, having her relationship, her job and still close friends with Jenny and Louisa.
However things with Jenny aren’t great, she’s going through a extremely emotional time. Angela is then summoned home by her mother, as it’s her mum’s 60th, and she is told to bring Alex with her.
The comedy largely comes from the two sides of her life colliding, her NY life, and her life before in London. Jenny decides to tag along, seeing as Angela was able to change her life by running across the Atlantic, she thinks that she will be able to do the same.
Jenny and Louisa clash very often, having very different ideas about how to plan Angela’s wedding. She and Alex decide that they are going to have their wedding in her mum and dad’s back yard. They make Jenny the one in charge of ‘wedding HQ’, but Jenny’s losing it, melting down over the least thing.
Kelk also reintroduces Cici, a recurring character from earlier books. Cici seems to have made it her mission in life to ruin Angela’s, and takes another crack at it in this one. She decides to disrupt the presentation that Angela and Delia have written, (they’re trying to get their magazine up and running) even though it’s in front of her grandfather.
There’s a lot of humour, as always with Kelk’s work. Some of the pieces I particularly enjoyed were the opening, when Angela flashes Bob (Her overall boss) by mistake. Angela and Louisa’s reunion featuring such lines as ‘Get out of bed you lazy mare,’, ‘Fuck off I’m tired’, ‘Leave the crisps I’m also starving’, and ‘Good thing I brought you some then. You look shit,’.
Louisa’s description of her daughter ‘I thought she was something from Alien when she was coming out’.
If you’re looking for something funny, or are already a fan of Kelk, and Angela like I am, then go and pick it up.
Musings of a thirtysomething woman 