Back of book summary:
Disillusioned with life as a literary publicist in London and sick of her hotshot TV presenter boyfriend, twenty-something Rosie Richardson decides to give up glitz for good deeds and escape to Africa to run a refugee camp. When famine strikes and a massive refugee influx threatens to overwhelm the camp, officials drag their heels. The only way to get food fast is to bring the celebrities first, so Rosie returns to London to organize a star-studded and risky emergency appeal.

This book is catogorized as Humor, Romance, and Women's Fiction. There's not much humor, more satirical than anything else. As for romance- a little. There's a couple of sex scenes, but I didn't see anything romantic about them. I'd call this more Chick Lit than Women's Fiction because of the above reasons. The cultural aspect of the book was more appealing to me than anything else.

Basically the book has three parts. It would have been easier for me to follow if I had known this before hand.

The first part is all about Rosie working in London and the bad choices she makes with an asshole boyfriend.
The second is Rosie working in the refugee camp. This is where the pace picked up and I began to enjoy it. The African storyline is wonderful and gutwrenching. I've read nonfiction books about the crisis in Africa and Fielding's detailed descriptions of the landscape and people seem accurate. I attribute this to the fact that she was a journalist that visited Africa often. Even though this is a work of fiction, she has done a good job of educating the reader.
The last section focuses on Rosie organizing the charity event. Here we see a little humor in the crazy celebrity characters she convinces to help with the emergency appeal.

The story starts in Africa, but constantly flashbacks to Rosie working in London and her screwed up relationship with the asshole boyfriend. This draws out the first part of the book in a painful way. It took me a week to read the first part because of grew tired of the flashbacks and kept putting the book aside.

Some of the dialogue with African characters was difficult to understand. I suppose it was written this way to appear realistic, but there's something about it that just irritated me.

Helen Fielding was a journalist that travelled to Africa often before becoming a novelist. This was her debut novel. She is also the author of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination.

Although the book is focused on Rosie's quest for happiness, the human interest story within her journey gives the reader a lot to think about.

I haven't read anything else by this author, not even the Bridget Jones books, so I can't compare this book to any of her other ones.

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Created Jan 28, 2019 at 1:14pm • Submit your own review...