WICKED FUN (Simply Divine - Wendy Holden)

Member Name: NikkiH

Product:	Simply Divine - Wendy Holden
Date:	06/01/01 (53 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun, cruelly true to life

Disadvantages: I read it too quickly

Wendy Holden's first novel seems to have come from personal experience. By trade, she is a journalist, and was previously the deputy editor of Tatler. She has also worked on Harpers and Queen, The Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and The Mail on Sunday, so she seems well placed to make observations on the lives of the rich and famous who feature on the pages of glossy magazines, and seem to fascinate a high number of the public.

The main character in the book is Jane, a love starved, somewhat overweight magazine editor who lives with her boyfriend Nick, the right hand man of the transport minister.

Jane's life is turned on her head when Nick leaves her, she has a fling with a neighbour and is assigned to write a column for her employers "Gorgeous" (similar to OK magazine) on a celebrity "it" girl called Champagne D'Vyne.

Jane is thrust into a life she feels she does not fit into, and her struggles with her image and weight are comical, but for me very realistic.

Wendy Holden has created characters in order to mock them in some ways. When Jane changes to jobs to a similar magazine, Fabulous (similar to Hello!), she finds herself working with Tish, Tosh and Tash, who complain when their boyfriends want to take them to Bali, as Sicily is the "in place" at the time.

Take time to say some of the characters names out loud as they are intentionally made into puns.

I did not want to put this book down, and finished it in record time, and laughed more than I have at a book in a long time.

Summary: