I’m taking it in turns between trashy books and ones that have a bit more substance, so this is the first of my set of books that are apparently ‘lost classics’. It’s about a man who makes a deal with the devil to exchange his shadow for everlasting riches. It sounds different, so we’ll see how it goes!

I had a couple of requests to post a review of the Sophie Kinsella/Madeleine Wickham book that I just read – ‘The Wedding Girl’. I don’t want to spoil the story for those that haven’t read it (I hate reviews that give you the ending in the first line), so these are just my opinions.

I’m a big Sophie Kinsella fan – her shopaholic series was good, and she’s written some other books that I really liked too. Madeleine Wickham is her real name, the one she used before she ‘rebranded’ herself as Kinsella. Apparently she did it because she wasn’t sure about the new direction her books were going in. To be honest, she would have been better keeping her name, seen as though no-one has heard of Wickham. I can see why her books have been re-released as ‘Sophie Kinsella writing as Madeleine Wickham’.

Reading this book, you could tell she was younger and less experienced when she wrote it. Some of the character descriptions seemed a bit forced or exaggerated, which I think disrupted from the flow of the story. The plot was good, although the end seemed quite rushed. There was a lot of build up, and then it seemed to just fizzle out. Wickham made an effort to intermingle three different stories, and while most of the book was written from the main character’s perspective, there were also chapters written from the perspective of the other characters, but I don’t think these stories were developed enough. I would happily have read a longer book to get more of a complete story.

Regardless of all this, I still really enjoyed the book. The story was good for the most part, and it was just like most chick-lit books in that I got to the end and just wanted to keep reading to see where the story was going to go.

I’m looking forward to reading the other two Wickham books to see what they are like, but at this stage I have to say I prefer her as Kinsella.