Emailing Allie

by Julie Lawson

[Leah]

When I was asked about whether or not I was interested in reading and reviewing Emailing Allie, I was immediately interested. I very much enjoy email-based novels and it reminded me pretty quickly of Holly’s Inbox, which was a brilliant book I read a while back. Emailing Allie is pretty much a new version of Holly’s Inbox, showing us the life of Allie Rainsbury, whose emails were discovered by her best friend Julie Lawson after Allie left the company. As far as I am aware, the novel is non-fiction – in that Allie Rainsbury, Julie Lawson, Scott Cooper and David Marshall are all apparently real people. But I’ll be honest and say I have my doubts. I think it’s the same sorta thing as Holly’s Inbox, where it’s billed as a real look at someone’s life, but actually it’s just an author who’s written it and it’s all purely fictional. But, who knows?

This isn’t going to be a very long review as it’s difficult to review a novel told entirely via email because you don’t really get to know the characters as well as a properly-written novel, y’know? To really know someone via email you’d have to write very long emails and it would sorta defeat the point. However, I quite liked Emailing Allie. It was a relatively quick read, but I found it very lacking in the humour of Holly’s Inbox. Allie was, despite her scatty nature, a very serious sort of person and as such, all of the email conversations she has with people are all very serious and lacking in warmth and humour.

The exchanges between Allie and Julie are great, probably the best in the book, and I did also enjoy those between Allie and Scott Cooper, but the majority of the novel focuses on Allie’s relationship with David Marshall and their exchanges are very bitty. They spent most of their time arguing over email and chucking accusations at each other and I just found it rather dull. It didn’t really read like a real relationship would. David went off at Allie (and vice versa) at the most stupid of things, and I just bored of it very quickly. I found David’s constant excuse making to be beyond the realms of believability too and I was with Julie when she said that if David really WAS interested, he would have made time rather than just cite work/tennis/squash as the reasons he couldn’t see her. It made me want to bash Allie’s head in. And if it really is a true story, then it just makes it worse because Allie was just so gullible and placid and apologetic for most of the exchanges with David (who by the way is an idiot!). Things like that sorta made me want to skip the pages a little bit. However, for the most part, I liked it. It wasn’t as good as Holly’s Inbox, but for those who liked Holly, will indeed enjoy Allie.