I. Simply. Can't. Resist. (Playing Away - Adele Parks)

Member Name: aylawarner

Product:	Playing Away - Adele Parks
Date:	12/07/09 (60 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: An exciting and passionate read, couldn't put it down

Disadvantages: Conflicting feelings towards Connie

"I'm married," I said.
"I'm a tart," John smiled
Both the defence and the challenge.
I. Simply. Can't. Resist

Connie lives a happy and normal life - a 9-5 job, a group of brilliant friends, and a fantastic husband she's been happily married to for only a year. But then she meets John Harding, the sexiest and most outrageous man she's ever met. He is confident, funny, arrogant, rude, disrespectful and completely unscrupulous and Connie can't resist.

After reading my first of Adele Park's books, Tell Me Something, which I absolutely loved, I was quite excited to get into my second of her novels with some high expectations.

The book is written in the first person from the view point of the main character, Connie. She starts out as a normal girl who has a great life and is newly and happily married to her best friend, Luke. When she first meets John at a work conference, she simply flirts a little and leaves it at that knowing that she would never do anything to hurt her husband. But the next time she meets John all her previous thoughts are thrown out of the window and she begins having a passionate affair. I found her character to be a slightly strange one as, because she was having an affair when she was perfectly happy with her married life, this immediately made me take a disliking for her, yet the book is written in a way which still somehow makes you like her.

Even though, throughout the book, Connie's friends continually tell Connie of how wonderful a husband she has and how great Luke is, we don't really see what his character is truly like as we don't see much of him in the book and he only really comes into it at the end. I think this was probably done intentionally so that so we couldn't really judge Connie for doing what she did and so that we still feel a liking for her character.

I ended up having conflicting feelings for Connie. She didn't seem to feel any guilt or remorse whatsoever about what she had done and what she continued to do and this made me feel that she was a selfish and horrible person. Yet she still had a lot of love for Luke and she was genuinely a nice person so my feelings for her kept jumping from positive to negative. By the end of the book though I did find myself feeling for her and I wanted her to get everything she wanted from life, whether that was a lustful relationship with John or a loving relationship with Luke.

Apart from the main storyline in the book which is Connie's affair, there are also other issues going on with Connie's friends. Daisy meets the love of her life, Rose and Peter are having a difficult time in their marriage coping with two new babies, Sam is constantly on the search for Mr Right and Lucy is just Lucy, jumping from one married man to the next with no strings attached.

Adele Park writes the book in a brilliant way. She makes the affair passionate and exciting and she makes you able to imagine what having an affair would actually feel like. She describes it in a way that makes the reader feel as if they shouldn't be reading about the affair - the same way Connie should feel about actually having it. Her writing really is excellent and she kept me completely immersed in every single page of the book.

Summary: The closest you'll get to having an affair, without actually having one.