Too nice for her own good? (Making of Minty Malone - Isabel Wolff)

Member Name: pink_glitter

Product:	Making of Minty Malone - Isabel Wolff
Date:	22/04/09 (112 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Light, easy to read

Disadvantages: doubt it will be everyone's cup of tea

This was the second of Isabel Wolff's novels that I had read, the first being The Trials of Tiffany Trott, which I reviewed not long ago. I quite enjoyed that one, so I was looking forward to reading this.

~The Plot~

We first meet Minty Malone on her wedding day. She's getting married to successful insurance salesman Dominic. As Minty begins to tell us about Dominic, we start to realise that he might not quite as perfect as she would have us believe. She tells us how Dominic tells her what to wear, and how he won't go to any of the places she likes, yet drags her on golf and fishing holidays. She tells us though, that she doesn't mind, because love is about compromise, and anyway, if she protests he gets angry, and Minty doesn't like confrontation.

As she gets to the altar wearing a dress she doesn't really like - she wanted Victorian lace, but Dominic said only designer would do, and made her show him a picture so he could decide if the dress she had chosen was suitable first - the couple begin to say their vows. Halfway through though Dominic stops. He says he can't do this, and leaves Minty standing there in front of over 200 of her friends, family and colleagues, humiliated.

After the initial shock, anger, humiliation, and tears have subsided, Minty comes to the conclusion that the reason Dominic treated her the way he did was that she was too nice. It's the same in her job as a radio reporter - she let's her colleagues walk all over her, and even in her own home, where her feisty cousin Amber came to stay for a couple of days and is still there months later. Minty decides the way forward is not to be so nice, and enrols on a course called 'The nice factor' to try to learn how to stand up for herself.

Will Minty be able to gain some confidence and learn how to be more assertive with people? And will she ever get over Dominic's betrayal, and find out the real reason he left her standing at the aisle?

~What I thought~

Well firstly I got into this novel straight away, unlike the last Isabel Wolff novel I read, which wasn't quite so quick paced. As a reader, we get to know and like Minty pretty much straight away, and the more tales she tells us of how Dominic treated her, the more we as a reader begin to loathe the man, and will Minty to see what he's really like, as she is constantly making excuses for his behaviour.

As the story goes on, we actually meet quite a lot of characters beyond the opening chapters of the novel, and usually the more characters a book has, the more I tend to get confused, but this wasn't the case here, which I can only conclude must have been because it was so well written.

The book didn't really take the direction I had expected it to from reading the description on the back, however I think the way the story developed was done quite well.

One thing that annoyed me was that Amber, Minty's cousin is supposed to be an author and there were constant references throughout to other famous novels, and I found them boring and unnecessary to the story, and in a way I wondered if it was just Isabel Wolff's way of showing off her literary knowledge!

I thought the characters were all realistic and as I said we sympathise with Minty almost immediately, and I felt like screaming 'can't you see he's no good for you!' when I was reading about the relationship she had with Dominic.

The book is quite light - it is chick lit after all - but it's not as 'fluffy' as some others I've read, and has a teeny bit more depth. Overall, I thought it was a good read, and I'm going to look out for more books by the same author in the future.

Summary: Overall, a good read