By Lauren Weisberger
Harper, £6.99
Lauren Weisberger’s latest is the perfect paperback for any label-lover en vacances, laced as it is with allusions to Valentino, le Cirque, la Perla, scarlet BMW convertibles and multi-carat HW diamonds-to-go. In her third book, Weisberger, best known for The Devil Wears Prada, delivers another neat line in female friends with ultimately sound values but somewhat suspect men.
Emboldened by raspberry mojitos on a girly night out, the three, almost-thirty women vow the coming year will change their lives. Romantically-minded restaurant manager Emmy sighs that her life has morphed into a sad chick flick. After forgiving him serial “slip-ups”, she has been dumped by her boyfriend of three years for a much younger, virgin, gym trainer. So now it is time, Emmy decides, for sex with random men. Spoiled and sybaritic Adriana resolves the reverse: after manifold affairs, she will settle for one man and a ring. For perennially cautious Leigh, however, the prospect of transformation is more perplexing. Who would not envy her job (as a top publishing house editor), her perfect apartment and her enviable boyfriend? In a carefully crafted lifestyle, Leigh’s secret spontaneity is guiltily repressed… until a hotshot bad-boy author singles her out to polish up his new novel.
Add to the wry story-line a toxic parent or two, an African grey parrot of nil verbal restraint, plus brief encounters in Curacao and Paris, and the twelve-month ends in tears and revelation: though not always getting what they crave, the friends find out what they really, really want.
