In Which We Discuss A Friend of the Family

A Friend of the Family is the one novel that feels quite different from the rest of Jewell's style.

The friend in question is Gervase, an ageing rocker with a strange ability to empathise and see problems that people wouldn't normally confide in other people. The family is the Londons; mother, father and three boys, Tony, Sean and Ned. These boys each have their own problems - Tony feels that life has passed him by, and wonders how he went from being the catch to the chubby older brother. Ned just got back from three years in Australia with a crazy woman, and feels like he's fallen off the track at some point or another. He doesn't know where his life is going. And Sean, well Sean has it all - a best-selling novel and the fiancé of his dreams. Until, that is, he gets a bit more than he can handle.

It's hard to analyse why this is my favourite of Jewell's novels. It may be because it's less of a romantic comedy/drama, and more about a family. The point of it isn't to get the girl, it's to get the life (although in a few cases, the girl comes with it).

Perhaps it might help to compare it to my least favourite, Thirty-Nothing. What annoyed me about that was that I could very clearly see the ending from the first few pages. You've all seen or read stories like that, where absolutely everyone know who's going to get together, and it's just the very frustrating case of waiting for the two main characters to stop being idiots. That kind of scenario also shows up in Vince and Joy, and to some extent in Ralph's Party. While A Friend of the Family does include a bit of waiting for people to stop being idiots, at least Gervase is there to tell them that.

There's one element that did rather annoy me about the book. When one character becomes pregnant, she says that five years ago, she would have got an abortion. But, as an engaged woman in her early thirties, she doesn't have that option. Well, why not?

Later on, she also asks "Why would be propose if he didn't want babies?". Well, there are a number of responses to that - because he wanted to marry you being the most obvious.

In Which We Discuss One Hit Wonder

Lisa Jewell's third novel, One Hit Wonder ties for favourite, in my opinion, with her fourth, A Friend of the Family. One Hit Wonder was published in 2001, while A Friend of the Family was published in 2004. Before and after those novels, Jewell released one novel a year.

One Hit Wonder focuses on the sister of one hit wonder, Bee Bearhorn, after her suicide. Bee's sister, Ana, never really knew Bee as an adult, due to a large age-gap and a complicated family.

Ana had an idea of Bee's life as being like Bee - loud, vibrant, and generally quite sparkly. The line that I feel really sums up Ana's mindset in the novel is as follows;

My sister, the one person who made being alive look any fun, killed herself.

Following Bee's death, Ana is sent to London to pack up her belongings. Once there, she meets Bee's friends, and start to find out more about her sister's life.

In Which We Discuss Thirtynothing

Lisa Jewell's second novel is probably my least favourite.

The storyline focuses on Dig and Nadine, two people who've been friends since secondary school, and who have just turned thirty(nothing). Despite everyone thinking they must be together, and despite having dated for the grand total of one day, they are emphatically not interested in each other.

You can see where this is going, right? So could I. From the very first page.

Then, the girl who broke Dig's heart, Delilah, shows up. Her disappearance was just as mysterious as her reappearance, so Dig tries to solve that mystery while falling for her over again. In the spirit of revenge/competition, Nadine calls her ex, Phil, and then shenanigans ensue.

I think I dislike this book because of it's predictability. The character's spend pages and pages obsessing over why they shouldn't do what we all know they will, and I find that very frustrating. Honestly, you want to just slap some sense into them.

This book doesn't involve as many people or links between them as Ralph's Party did, but it does delve deeply into the past, and how events there formed people's reactions today, a theme Jewell revisited in her later novels.

As I said, Thirtynothing is my least favourite of Jewell's novels, but it's still better than some by other authors.