I Heart New York (I Heart, #1)

by Lindsey Kelk

It's official. Angela Clarke is in love – with the most
fabulous city in the world.

Fleeing her cheating boyfriend and clutching little more than a crumpled bridesmaid dress, a pair of Louboutins and her passport, Angela jumps on a plane, destination New York.

Holed up in a cute hotel room, Angela gets a NYC makeover from her NBFJenny and a whirlwind tour of the city that never sleeps. Before she knows it, Angela is dating two sexy guys. And, best of all, she gets to write about it in her new blog (Carrie Bradshaw eat your heart out). But it's one thing telling readers about your romantic dilemmas, it's another figuring them out for yourself.

Angela has fallen head over heels for the big apple…but does she heart New York more than home?

• ISBN13: 9780007288380
• Publish Date: 25 June 2009
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 10 March 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Inc
• Imprint: HarperCollins
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 336
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[Emma (SCR)]

This review was originally posted on Star Crossed Reviews We kick off at Louisa's wedding. Louisa is Angela's best friend. The party is well under way but the pain of wearing high heels all night gets to Angela (who of us hasn't had that issue) so she goes to the car to put on her old trusted flats, she opens the car door only to find her fiancé, Mark, cheating on her with his tennis partner, Katie. At first she has the natural reaction to scream and shout at everyone. She feels like a fool. Even her best friend knew. The next day the only thing she wants to do is get as far away from him and everyone she knows.

So she gets on the first plane to an English speaking country and ends up in New York. A sobbing heart-broken mess. Mark was her life. For the last 10 years she's been building a life with him and now she doesn't know, well anything really.

The first order of business is to find a hotel where, Angela meets Jenny Lopez. Jenny thinks that one day she will be the Oprah. She takes Angela under her wing and she is soon finding her way in the Big Apple.

With a new friend, a very gorgeous new Marc Jacobs bag, a blog and two dinners with two hot men, New York soon seems like the perfect place for Angela, but dating two men and writing about them for the whole of New York to see soon becomes a problem....

One of the main reasons I love this book is how easy it is to relate to Angela. She's your typical girl, she loves everything a girl probably shouldn't; Mr Ben and Mr Jerry, chocolate, cakes, cookies and spending all her money on Marc Jacobs to name just a few.

I am DYING to visit New York. It seems so magical. When I do I will definitely be using the guide at the back of the book. One of my favourite parts of this book is when she first arrives in NY and Jenny brings her lots and lots of food via room service, and by food I mean cookies, cakes, chocolate, ice cream.

This is a great ChickLit read. Lindsey has you crying, laughing and shopping (lots of shopping).

[Leah]

At her best friend’s wedding, Angela Clark finds her boyfriend cheating on her in his car. After storming back into the wedding to confront her best friend, Angela flees to New York and ends up staying in the first hotel she comes to. The girl working on the concierge at the hotel, Jenny, befriends Angela and takes her under her wing, giving Angela a make-over and showing her New York City’s sights. Within days, Angela is dating two guys and has a job blogging about her adventures in the City but will home lure her back?

I hadn’t really heard of I Heart New York until a while ago so when I saw it on a market stall I thought it sounded fantastic and decided to buy it. I read some reviews, some good, some bad and finally decided to give it a read myself. I wanted to enjoy it so so much as I love books set in New York but I just found I Heart New York a major disappointment. I read a lot of books set in New York – I wish people would set their books in other American states, there are 50 of them after all! – so I expect a pretty high standard when reading about the fantastic city that is New York. I’ve never been to New York so I want the book to transport me there. I Heart New York failed miserably.

My main problem with the book is that there’s essentially no plot. It’s plotless. Nothing of major importance happens in the book to set up an exciting and readable ending and I found myself fed up after 60-odd pages. I perservered to see if it got any better and it just didn’t. My next problem with the book is just how easily everything slipped into place for Angela. I’m willing to let some things slide when reading chick lit books but even for me, this was totally and utterly unbelieveable. I can take the fact Angela and Jenny became friends so quickly but I can’t take the fact she managed to blag herself multiple dates within two days of being in New York nor the fact she just so happened to land a job blogging about her life. It was all very convenient and I was waiting for something to come along and unsettle Angela’s now-perfect world but nothing ever did and the book just kind of tailed off.

Yet the book started so well, with Angela finding her boyfriend Mark cheating on her at her best friend’s wedding. I thought that the opening two chapters were hilarious, but it all seemingly went down hill from there. The blurb on the back makes it sound as if Angela jumped onto a plane to New York wearing her bridesmaids dress but that wasn’t the case. As far as I’m concerned that would have been a fantastic thing to include because everyone seeing her at the airport wearing a bridesmaids dress, clutching a pair of expensive shoes, would be thinking “What on Earth’s going on?”. As it is, the book misses out any kind of airport scene and after Angela tells her mother she’s leaving we skip to her arrival in NYC. After Angela’s arrival in NYC, everything then falls into place and she (seemingly) has the perfect life and that’s pretty much all that happens.

I can’t say I particularly cared for Angela throughout the book because her life all fell into place perfectly and still she complained. It’s very hard to be sympathetic towards someone who two/three days after breaking up with her boyfriend of 10 years, is then dating two other men. She spent the first day in tears after the break up but after that she was fine. It was very peculiar. Regardless of how much Angela and Mark’s relationship had deteriorated over the years, I still expected Angela to feel a bit more heartbroken after the break up of a 10 year relationship, not to mention the fact it was her first proper relationship. Another thing that irritated me about Angela was the fact that she was dating two guys – and blogging about it – but when one of the guys told her he was dating people other than her, she went completely off on one. Pot. Kettle. Black. That’s pretty much Angela in a nutshell: immensely self-absorbed. My favourite character was Jenny, whom Angela befriends during her first hour in New York. She was a fantastic character and I absolutely loved her. However even Jenny irritated me, the way she worshipped Angela – constantly calling Angela “heroic” for running away after finding her boyfriend cheating on her – was beyond irritating, but apart from that, she was hugely enjoyable. I’d love to see her in a book just about her. Of the two men Angela dates, Tyler and Alex, Alex was my favourite. I always thought Tyler seemed blase about the whole thing and I didn’t particularly like him. All of the characters, bar Jenny, though were all one-dimensional and quite cliched though: the Brit in America, the hotshot banker, the rock star…

Kelk’s writing is nothing spectacular and I hated the way, as I mentioned above, that Angela was treated like some sort of heroine for fleeing the country and coming to New York. I would actually call it cowardice, but that’s just me. Kelk’s writing made Angela seem pretty childish I think, too, not just because she chose to fly rather than fight but because, considering she was supposed to be 26, she still had no idea what she was doing with her life. I didn’t expect Angela to have it all mapped out, but all she seemed to do before getting her job, was spend money whilst having no viable income. I also found myself getting irritated with the fact she kept calling the men “boys” as it made her sound like a teenager. The book also had a few editing errors (on the first page Angela is “peaking” rather than “peeking” as well as “thing” rather than “think”) which drives me insane – books are proofread so many times you would think they’d pick up on an error so small. It may be a childish thing to pick up on but it’s just incredibly irritating.

For me, though, the book tried too hard to be in the mould of a Sophie Kinsella novel. It tried to be funny, it tried to make Angela a likeable heroine but for me it failed on all accounts.It’s so light I’m surprised it’s not suspended in mid-air. Don’t get me wrong, I like a light-hearted read as much as the next person but the least I expect from such a light-hearted read is for it to make me laugh. This did not and I found it a hugely disappointing read. I have I Heart Hollywood to read, the sequel to I Heart New York, so we’ll see if it gets any better.