Confessions of a Shopaholic

Confessions of a Shopaholic
Sophie Kinsella

In a nutshell
Becky Bloomwood is broke. Well, she’s always broke, but this time it’s serious. She’s got letters from credit card companies coming at her left, right and centre, and a man called Derek Smeath knocking at her door. Obviously throwing the bills into the bin straight away isn’t working anymore. It’s also obvious that the journalism job she has just isn’t cutting it in the pay stakes anymore. She needs a plan. And a new outfit to go with it.

What’s right with it
The book should almost be called “Becky’s Money Adventures”, as it follows her trying—at least a little—to fix her little money problem. Sometimes the outcomes are quite amusing, sometimes they left me rolling my eyes, but the character is still relatable anyway. You cheer for her when she sorts her problems—both financial and romantic—out. Like it or not, there’s a little bit of Becky Bloomwood in us all—that inner voice that urges us to blow our pay on a really nice, really expensive pair of Manolo Blahniks, purely because they make our legs look bloody fabulous in them.

What’s wrong with it
Becky Bloomwood, actually. At times, I felt like reaching into the book and shaking some sense into her. She’s naïve and extremely irresponsible—to the point where you just want to slap her—about her finances. Things like tossing VISA bills into the garbage, or blowing a hundred pounds because you feel upset (even though you’re already about a thousand pounds in debt) are definitely not examples we need being set in the current economic climate. I know something along this tune has been said before by people better than me, and to be fair to Kinsella, the book was published some ten years ago, when recession was just a dirty word of the past, but right here and now this kind of book (and now movie) is just not needed.

Last word
Even though it’s extremely unlike its movie namesake in almost every element, it’s a fairly breezy read that leaves you contemplating the kind of materialistic world we live in—a heavy message for a seemingly simple chick-lit.

Scale-of-awesomeness
Mediocre