I’ve read a few other Nicola May books before and I’ve had a bit of a mixed bag really, loving a couple of them, and not really getting along with the others. This is the last one that I had left to read on my Kindle, so I was curious to see which camp this one fell in.

My first impression was that the characters were rather stereotypical, a rather plain looking woman who doesn’t rate herself very highly, with a gorgeous gay best friend with whom she shares everything. I was also immediately distanced from feeling a connection with the main character (Amy) by her fondness for astrology, and soon realising the the entire basis of the book was around star signs. I don’t believe in all that mumbo jumbo, so it kind of put me off.

The plot of the book felt to me kind of similar to the plot of another Nicola May book, Working it Out. A woman doesn’t know where she’s going with a certain area of her life (jobs/love), so she decides that rather than making an intelligent decision, she should just try a bit of everything. Whereas in Working it Out it was a different job every month for a year, in this book it was to try dating a man from each different star sign. What could go wrong, right?

As I mentioned before, I just couldn’t form any kind of bond with Amy, she’s a very impulsive person, which manifests itself in her seeming to try to sleep with every guy she meets. She’s also extremely gullible, thinking she’s fallen for a guy and lending him £6k without any questions for a charity ball he is supposedly organising. But alas, when she turns up for the ball, it isn’t there and he’s swanned off to Australia with all her money.

I probably should have guessed from the title of the book, but the star signs thing actually really started to annoy me by the middle to end of the book. Things like Amy blaming the failure of a date on the fact that the guy was the wrong star sign, rather than the fact that she got wasted before going go-karting and crashed spectacularly through all the other competitors and into a wall.

The ending of the book (which I won’t spoil in case you do actually want to read it), was disappointing to me, although nothing that I didn’t expect after the other 90% of the book. You can probably guess that Amy chooses a guy and lives happily ever after, but in my opinion, she chose the definite wrong guy, although probably the one that she deserves.

Apart from the lack of connection to the characters, I found that the plot jumped about quite wildly, like the author had thought of a list of ideas and was trying her best to fit them all in to the story, which meant that areas which could probably have had a lot more time spent on them to make the story feel more rich and complete and less scattered. And while I like my ‘chick-lit’ books, I don’t like the assumption that all women just want to read about the characters sleeping with everyone in sight, but maybe I’m just a little old-fashioned.