I’ve had this book since the movie came out, so probably around 9-10 years and only got around to reading it now. It started off good - a very addictive and light chick-flick that had me laughing at times. But as the book went on, I got more and more annoyed with it.

The writing was easy to understand and not dense which was refreshing. Although I really enjoyed the start to halfway point of the novel, I didn’t enjoy very much after that sadly. I did find Rebecca funny at times and she was definitely a lot smarter than she gave herself credit for. But everything seemed to wrap up rosy at the end - with her friendships, relationship with Luke and the whole debt thing with Derek Smeath, even though he had been sending her warning letters the whole book and she had blown his meetings off time and time again? And then when you think she’s changed and matured at the end, she goes and blows off the next meeting with a silly excuse and he doesn’t get too annoyed at her for it? It really irked me how she kept throwing the letters away and ignoring them, then worried afterwards about her cards being cancelled and people chasing after her, but she still went on to continue blowing off meetings and not paying her bills or getting her finances in check?

Also, she told her parents and friends that Derek was a stalker and never explained the situation properly to anyone. If she had of thought about her actions and explained herself rather than twisting and lying and getting herself into bad situations, things wouldn’t have been so bad. I felt she treated Tarquin, Luke and Suze really horribly as well, twisting things and telling lies about her aunt for sympathy and money? Everything wrapped up so nicely and things started to go her way and she would get carried away with every situation and think she doesn’t know anything about finance but still she managed to be successful with the article and television show.

I don’t know, I could go on for ages about this book but I’ll summarise it now - I didn’t enjoy it after the halfway point, Rebecca was immature, annoying and didn’t think about her actions or their consequences. I felt she treated everyone horribly and then felt bad when things went wrong, everything always went her way in the end and it was one thing after another. I was expecting her to change her ways throughout the book but the last 50 pages or so were the ones where we saw some redemption. But then by the last few pages, there she was again making up excuses about her meeting with Derek. Maybe we would see more character development over the series, but I’m not interested in reading any more books in this series and I will be unhauling this one.

I did enjoy the writing style and would be interested in reading other novels from this author. In this case, I did not enjoy the book and much preferred the movie where we saw some character growth and redemption from Rebecca. These are just my thoughts on the novel - 100% my own opinion!