Leah
Written on Sep 29, 2011
The Jewels Of Manhattan sees Carmen Reid taking her writing in a bit of a different direction. Usually, she’s directing the rather outrageous Annie Valentine as she tries to take over the world, one fashion item at a time, but here she’s wrestling with the Jewel sisters who have moved from their native Texas to Manhattan to find the perfect life. Trouble is, finding the perfect life is a lot easier in thought than in reality. So the Jewel sisters do what any sane sisters would do… And they decide to rob some jewels. Well, that’s what the synopsis tells me anyway, but the book plays out a lot more different than that. Sure, jewels are heisted (is that even a word), but the book isn’t about the Jewel sisters suddenly becoming criminal masterminds. In fact, only one of the Jewel sisters is a (potential) criminal mastermind and that’s Em. Amber and Sapphire want nowt to do with it and there is not a cocktail napkin in sight as Em plans to make her fortune.
But despite the misleading synopsis (I expected the three girls to be totally on board with the heist and for it to be very Hustle/Leverage-esque as they scale walls and disable security alarms and… well, you know, do heist-y things) I did enjoy the book; it’s massively readable and I finished it in double-quick time. It is very cheesy though. One thing you may not already be aware of (but you will be after one page of The Jewels of Manhattan) is that Carmen Reid is not a Texan Southern Belle. Therefore, making your three sisters Texan probably wasn’t the smartest idea, especially since the result was rather soap-opera-ish. (Not helped by the fact Carmen says Dallas was one of the things she watched to get all the Texan stuff correct.) I’m not entirely sure Carmen meant for the sisters to be OTT Texan belles, but that’s how they panned out and it was a tad cringe-worthy. I mean, the sisters were nice and all… But they couldn’t pull of a jewel heist, not even if they wanted to. They were just too nice, and despite the fact things do happen that mean they have to get smart real quick, well it’s still a tad unrealistic.
Obviously because it’s a Chick Lit novel, you expect some romance, but since the book was meant to be about three sisters stealing the perfect life (take a look at the synopsis. That’s what it says!) I was rather surprised at how much romance there was. For starters, I’d just like to say that Detective Jack did not sound particularly handsome (nor smart, which I’d think is a requisite for a New York Detective). I mean, that’s part of the trouble. If you want to write a Chick Lit/crime hybrid well, you have to make sure you have the players to play their parts. And you have to keep the romance to a minimum, and I did somewhat feel the romance got in the way a little bit. That there was a bit too much of it. Basically, because I expected a heist novel, the fact that I didn’t disappointed me. I was mis-sold, if I’m honest. The synopsis is much, much different than the inside product, so I suppose that’s where my disappointment lies.
If there’s one big downfall of The Jewels of Manhattan – though it may seem I’ve pointed out many downfalls, I would like to say here and now I did like the novel, even if it does sound as if I doth protest too much – it’s the writing. Like I said, Carmen Reid is not Texan. Not even close. She’s Scottish. She’s not even a little bit American and it shows. Badly. It’s as if before settling down to write she watched a ton of bad American soap-operas and then well, her imagination ran away with her and suddenly, everybody in America talks in metaphors akin to this one: “You must have been sweating like turkeys before Thanksgiving”. The book is filled with metaphors like that and it’s embarrassing. Also, nobody in New York uses the word you. It’s all “yas” and “y’alls” and well, it all should have been edited out. Because it sounded like a bad 80s or 90s movie/soap. Reid is a talented writer, and she should have just written the novel properly, normally, rather than trying to make it sound American because instead it did come off as fake and cringe-worthy and it ruined the book. I enjoyed it, to all intents and purposes, but the writing rather ruined a lot of it for me. I’d have enjoyed it much, much more if it had been written normally. It’s definitely a novel where you need to suspend your beliefs, especially the ending, but it is enjoyable if you can get past the writing and the cliched Americanisms. I would recommend it and I did enjoy it, but The Jewels of Manhattan isn’t the jewel I was expecting. (Sorry for the pun. It’s inexcusable.)