Miracle on Regent Street

by Ali Harris

[Leah]

Miracle On Regent Street by Ali Harris is a novel that promises a lot of things. It promises that dreams can come true, that miracles may occur and that if I love Cecelia Ahern (which I do) then I will fall head over heels for Ali Harris. And yet, after finishing it I feel let down. I feel, quite honestly, that I was mis-sold by the words on the back of the book. Because whilst Evie does indeed attempt to turn Hardy’s around, there’s no mention on the synopsis that, quite frankly, Evie is one of the worst female characters I’ve read about, that she’s so downtrodden and such a sap… that I had to put the book down after I read the first day. (The book is broken up into chapters/chunks/parts counting down the days until Christmas, with chapters inside of that.)

Mostly I feel as though Miracle On Regent Street would work better as a movie. It’s almost as if Ali Harris wrote it like a movie. I feel that as a Christmassy rom-com starring whomever it would work better, but as a book it’s missing that spark. The book is almost 500 pages long and yet it could have been vastly shorter had someone shushed Evie up; her inner monologue runs to pages and she does seem to have verbal diorrhea. It’s written very poetically too, I mean just in the first chapter we hear of roofs that look as though they’ve had “vanilla ice cream melted over the peppermint, orange, raspberry and lemon-sorbet coloured houses”. I love a good comparison like that, but that’s just a very sickly-sweet way to describe some roofs. Roofs are roofs. Evie just seems to be in her own little dream world and sadly the novel sort of just falls into that, as Evie suddenly becomes some super-hero who is just AWESOME at making a shop suddenly be busy again.

Maybe I’m cynical, or maybe I just prefer my Chick Lit to at least have some semblance of realism, but I just couldn’t shake how utterly stupid it was that Evie was this big savior. Evie managed to be able to shake up the shop so much there was talk of a helper elf? The very same Evie, who allows people to call her Sarah because she’s too much of a wuss to tell them she’s actually not Sarah. Evie, who quite happily then takes someone else’s identity to go on a date with a guy because she feels she “deserves” it, especially after the person whose identity she takes “steals” what should have been Evie’s job. The way Evie’s mind worked was baffling. I couldn’t make out if she was genuinely downtrodden or if she just wanted to come across that way, because she soon perked up once there was a man on the scene, she soon decided that being someone else was perfectly reasonable, and it irritated me.

It had all the right ingredients. It had a plot that could have worked, except the characters failed miserably. Evie just irritated me, the book just seemed to irritate me for some reason. Sometimes you just get off on the wrong foot with a book, and the fact that I had to literally put it down after 88 pages and leave it along for 4 days tells you all you need to know. I had to try to forget how annoying that first day was so I could continue. You expect your characters to grow whilst reading and Evie never does. For a 28-year-old she was rather petulent – throwing tantrums and storming off without letting people finish sentences, jumping to ridiculous and totally wrong conclusions because (gasp) she heard someone on a phone. It felt mishandled, really. Many people will disagree, many people will adore it, but it just didn’t work for me. The only saving grace was the fringe characters like Felix and Lily and Sam, they were the only characters whom I really liked. The rest I could have happily done without, including Evie, and that always ruins a book, when you don’t like the main character, when she’s so insipid you just don’t care what happens to her because, frankly, she deserves to just be a stockroom girl, when she can’t even tell people what her name actually is.