A fun and at times, intriguing look at a housewives dsisolving marriage and her obsessions with shopping in order to cope with an unfulfilling life. Her eventual epiphany is accompanied by an ever increasing spiral of violence and crime, and one ends up being as bewildered as she is. Plot twists, and a strange partial dissociation between the front half and the latter half of the book,mean make it a little disorientating. If it had a weakness, it would be that the latter third and especially the last quarter, was simply too cinematic and not believable at all. The pacing was good and this was intriguing entertainment but not amongst, in my view, Fowler's best. ( )

This novel had a fast moving and exciting plot, and the author has a good writing style. I should have liked it more than I did. I think that was mainly due to my failure to connect with the protagonist and narrator, June (say that name and immediately she's a pensioner. But apparently she's 29). I never knew who she was - it's hard enough for a male author to narrate as a woman and hats off to him for stepping up, but June came across less as a woman than as a man with low sef-esteem. And then there were the sudden changes of personality: one minute she is hesitant, liver of a sheltered life, not at all streetwise. Next minute she is resourceful, brave, knower of facts, user of long words, sprinting along roads at high speed in high heels (not apparently noticing that the heels got broken a couple of paragraphs earlier). In short, she is anything the plot requires at any given time. And it irked me that her husband was called Gordon - authorly shorthand to indicate the guy is a nerd, a loser, a generally laughable idiot. It always annoys me when writers use this cheapest of devices (I'll give you one guess what my husband's name is).

What I liked very much was the humour, which bubbled along nicely and included some genuine laugh out loud moments. The one about throwing out a perfectly good housewife, and better still the one about Greggs' bakery and the iced genitals are worth looking out for. I'm not sure I'll be seeking out any of the author's other work though. ( )