"a comedy that counts" apparently - hmm I think not (Addition - Toni Jordan)

Member Name: azana

Product:	Addition - Toni Jordan
Date:	30/01/09 (170 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Light read

Disadvantages: Frustrating

Addition by Toni Jordan has one great marketing point - that good old Richard and Judy sticker on the front cover, which I am guessing makes a book fly out of the shops and the internet stores.

I bought this book as part of the Jan 2009 www.thebookpeople.co.uk offer of 5 Richard and Judy books for £10. I find that actually some of the selected books are very good, and at £2 it wasn't a huge risk.

The book is about Grace Lisa Vandebury and is a boy meets girl light read with a twist. Grace counts everything, the steps to the cafe, the seeds on her orange cake (the author is Australian so I assume orange cake with poppy seeds is a typical dish down under), and the letters in people's names. When she meets Seamus she soon has to reveal the confines of her world and tries to change.

I went through enjoying this book as a light read to becoming quite annoyed with it. I had no problem with the heroine of the book suffering from OCD, or the concept of the main character suffering from mental illness as often it can be enjoyable to see the world through someone else's eyes. I liked the humour of the main character too - some of the dialogue rang very true and the therapy scenes were quite amusing. I did just end up finding the heroine just too self obsessed and two dimensional - though the dialogue was believable something about her just wasn't. For a supposedly 35 year old heroine even though part of her condition maybe was supposed to be a childlikeness that made her get on well with her young niece Larry, she just seemed too immature and egocentric to be likeable.

I don't know if this was me just showing my age but I felt it really hard to have any sympathy for her at all, even when the reason for her condition was revealed. The heroine herself wants to escape the confines of her ruled by counting life which has dictated that she has no job and no real spontaneous moments in her day - the problem is I ended up kind of feeling the same way.

The hero seemed to materialise out of nowhere and even though for the sake of a good old chick lit book I am prepared to suspend belief I did find myself muttering "oh please" to myself a few times. I wasn't terribly suprised by any twist the book took - again totally acceptable in a lighter read but the key thing to me was I wasn't sad when the book ended and I didn't speculate as to how the story would have carried on.

As a light read I found this book quite average, but not up to the glowing reviews and I am not in any hurry to read anything else by this author. It was a nice idea to try and paint a real heroine who is not classically perfect and is a little quirky and still finds love but there is not enough humour in this to make it an amusing enough read to excuse the frustration I felt with the heroine.

Summary: A light chick flit that didn't quite do it for me