No Play! (Playing Away - Adele Parks)

Member Name: IainWear

Product:	Playing Away - Adele Parks
Date:	02/12/05 (109 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's easy to read

Disadvantages: It's easy to want to throw it away!

Over the years, I've become quite a fan of the chick-lit and bloke-lit genres. It's one of those guilty pleasures, in which you know every time you pick the book up that you should be reading something with a bit more depth but you just don't quite have the will power to let go. Fortunately, I think I may just have found the book to cure my addiction to the genre.

A couple of years ago, I was given a free book on the purchase of a travel guide. This book, Adele Parks' "Playing Away", sat unwanted and unloved upon my shelf until a friend who has similar reading tastes to me mentioned she was a big fan of the author. Given that our tastes coincide in so many ways, I figured it couldn't hurt to give it a try. If only I had known then what I know now.

Connie is married to Luke and has been for the last year, she believes happily. However, life is becoming stale so when she meets John Harding at a work conference, she struggles to resist. Then, when she meets him again at a similar event, she fails. For Connie, meeting John Harding is lust at first sight and although she is at first determined not to sleep with him, her resistance soon crumbles. She throws herself headlong into an affair with him, making sure her husband doesn't find out and even keeping the secret from some of her closest friends for fear they would neither understand nor approve.

What follows is tedious in its predictability. Not just in Connie's life, but in what happens to her friends. The details may not be exactly how you may have imagined or expected them to be, but in general terms, everything you would expect to happen does happen. There are no surprises to be had here and there is nothing missing. From the brief plot synopsis I gave above, you could write a list of what you would expect to happen and you would find it on your way through "Playing Away".

In addition to being predictable, it's all very vacuous. There's very little of substance here, with the whole book seeming to be a recounting of the situation as it unfolds and the conversations between friends, in both triumph and crisis for each of them. Whilst I realise I shouldn't expect too much from a chick-lit novel, this felt dumbed down even by the standards of most, so much so that I could almost feel myself losing IQ points as I read.

The characters weren't particularly well drawn and it's quite tough to sympathise with any of them, even when they are struggling with aspects of their lives. None of them seem particularly likeable and even when there comes a time where you are perhaps encouraged to sympathise with one character, or take sides after disagreements between them; I simply found that I couldn't be bothered. By that point, I was just too bored with the whole thing.

On the plus side, if you like this kind of thing, it's very simply done and it's going to be a relaxing read, in that there's not going to be much brain involvement. It's something to run your eyes over without having to put any effort into it. If you're into reading before you go to bed, this is about the perfect thing to be reading, as it's not going to leave you thinking about what you've read while you're trying to shut down and sleep and it's not as if you're going to miss out on much by being too tired to concentrate.

I'd decided before I was more than two chapters in to "Playing Away" that I hated it. I'm not sure quite what prompted me to keep going. Probably one part stubbornness and one part blind optimism that it might improve. It didn't.

Not having read any of Adele Parks' other novels, I'm not sure if this is just a really poor choice from her books or if this really is as good as she gets. Needless to say, she's not an author I shall be reading anything more of, as I'd much rather read something I'd enjoy.

If you are a fan of Adele Parks already or a fan of chick-lit, or just of reading that doesn't involve and brain work, you might just enjoy this. But be warned, my copy came free and I felt it was still over priced. Copies have been seen from 1p at both eBay and the Amazon Marketplace, but anywhere else and you're going to be paying way in excess of what something like this is truly worth, with prices ranging from £3.75 at Green Metropolis up to a laughable £5.49 from play.com and £5.59 from Amazon.

But if you value your brain in any way, please don't bother. You'll only hate yourself for it afterwards. It's bad enough to put me off reading chick-lit for good, as I can't bear the thought of stumbling across something like this again.

Summary: Chick-lit novel that lets the genre down badly.