Addison's Wedding (Talking to Addison - Jenny Colgan)

Member Name: scottish20

Product:	Talking to Addison - Jenny Colgan
Date:	11/08/02 (169 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy reading, Empathy for characters

Disadvantages: Suddenly a good plot changes into a dreadful plot!

"Talking to Addison" is Jenny Colgan's second "best seller"....but I was most disappointed with it.

I read "Amanda's Wedding" on holiday this year. I got it free with "Cosmopolitan" magazine, but the paper back sat on my bookshelf for nearly a year before I read it. You see, I didn't think it was really me as I am not into tacky romantic stories! But I thought it might be just the thing to read on the beach, and how pleasantly suprised I was. In fact, when I saw that Cosmo were giving the next Colgan book away this August, I couldn't wait.

Talking to Addison follows the trauma's of flourist, singleton and all-in-all loser, Holly. Holly is very similar to Mel from Amanda's wedding and instantly I liked her. Holly's flat mates are somewhat more successful than herself; gorgeous Josh is a lawyer and undecided about his sexuality and Kate is a high flying City worker who is constantly falling in love with married men.

And then there is Addison, the shy computer geek...and Holly fancies him like mad! But Addison has a girlfriend - a fat agraphodic, star-wars fan, Claudia from Baltimore. Holly, however, doesn't think their internet relationship could spoil her chances of pulling Addison.

To complicate things even more, Finn, another science geek is besotted with Holly but their constant misunderstandings means that their relationship never really gets off the ground. Or does it?

So the story follows Holly from flat sharing distaster to moving in with Addison, Kate and Josh, from singles parties to dates at the Natural History museum and from bitch fighting to the high dependancy unit at St Hugh's.

Up until this point, I was hooked, desparate to know how the Finn-Holly-Addison-Claudia love 'triangle' would turn out, to see if Josh was really gay and to find out if Kate really fancied Josh! But then it all went a bit wrong. The
plot suddenly changes to the highly sureal and althogether, far-fetched. A national TV programme wants to make a series about Addison and Holly. Holly's character slides out of her character and becomes overly sarcastic and, I thought, very hard. It is alsmost as if the last 1/3 of the book is written by Colgen's sister!

Basically, having read the book, I created my own ending in which Addison and Holly got it together after the accident as Addison finally came out of his shell. In fact, Addison became so confident, that he gave a fantastic best man's speech at Kate and Josh's wedding.

However, it didn't turn out like that and I was bitterly disappointed, especially since I was so delighted with "Amanda's Wedding". I don't think i shall rush out to buy "Looking for Andrew McCarthy" but if Cosmo give it away free next summer, I may be tempted to give Colgen the benefit of the doubt.

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