Happily Ever After

by Harriet Evans, Terry Evans, and Ms Terry Evans

[Leah]

For the first time in a long time, possibly ever, I am wondering what to write for my review of a book. I’ve struggled with Harriet Evans’s novels in the past – I didn’t even finish I Remember You – but I like to give authors another chance and I loved the sound of Happily Ever After. I adore books about books, who doesn’t? It’s fabulous. And rare. For most of the novel, the title distracted me, because it didn’t seem there would ever be a happy ending, that Elle was far too cynical about love for it to ever really occur, and I suppose that sort of hindered the book a bit for me, because despite us seeing Elle with three boyfriends, she never seemed particularly bothered about any of them. I was never convinced she actually liked any of the men she was with.

I suppose, though, that after the life Elle has had, it’s fair she’s cynical about love and when we first meet her, as a young girl, all she knows is her parents arguing and her mother drinking. From that point onward, we see Elle’s life, mostly her career it has to be said, as she strives to make it in the publishing industry, from a small independent publisher to a large New York one. The novel jumps about a lot. We see a period of Elle’s life, say 1999, then jumps all the way to 2008 with so much as a by your leave. So the first page set in 2008 makes no sense. It was confusing. It could have done with a better transition. I felt it too just a touch too long to fill in the blanks. It was hart to warm to Elle. Really, really hard. The novel was written in third-person so perhaps if it was told solely from Elle’s point of view it may have been easier, but she was a really cold character.

I wanted to like the book, and to be fair, I didn’t hate it. It just doesn’t seem to have made an impression. Harriet is a fabulous writer, I have no doubt, and I did manage to finish the novel, I was just a bit bored. That sounds awful, I know, but we needed to see more of Elle’s life than just that of career-girl-Elle. I know that she was her career, and that was sort of her anchor, but with so many family issues, it just seems as if nothing was resolved. I have quite a great family, probably the best family a person can ask for, so it was weird for me that Elle’s dad treated her the way he did. He was awful. To his daughter. He whinged and moaned about paying for a flight to New York that was subsequently cancelled. I wanted Elle to tell him where to go, very badly. There weren’t many bright lights in Elle’s life, most were really awful back-stabbing people, and the only character who made any sort of impression was Tom. Tom really was a bright light in a sea of darkness, I thought he got more out of Elle than anyone else in the novel, period.

So, yes, that’s how I saw Happily Ever After. I finished it, which is fabulous. But, I wanted more. We constantly told how Elle has grown up, but to me, better clothes and a change of hair colour does not constitute growing up and because we never actually get to see Elle as she does her growing I still think she’s the girl she was when she first started at Bluebird, her first job. It’s something everyone comments on, but it just never really rang true for me. I wanted to love it, and it was OK, don’t get me wrong, but it did not blow me away. Sadly. I’m actually planning to buy Harriet’s new novel Not Without You when it’s released in March because I’ve read a teaser and it sounds good, but Happily Ever After was only OK. It was just a bit too slow for me.