Here I Go Again

by Jen Lancaster

[Leah]

Jen Lancaster is famous in the non-fiction world thanks to her hilarious memoirs that I haven’t actually read and as such, can’t fawn over, yet. She made the step over to fiction writing last year with her novel If You Were Here and is back in December with her second novel Here I Go Again. As soon as I saw I could get a digital review copy from her publisher, I was chuffed. Because of the success of her non-fiction books I was dying to try Jen out for myself, and where better to start than her newest book?

Lissy Ryder is the girl you hate. The kinda girl who tormented you in high school (unless you were a Lissy Ryder). She’s the kind of girl who expects everything to be handed to her on a plate and for it never to go pear-shaped. So when she loses her high flying job, her gorgeous husband and her house and finds herself back living with her parents, she has to ask herself, where did it all go wrong? After a disastrous 20-year reunion, Lissy would do almost anything to go back in time and change whatever she could to make sure her life in the present was as cushy as it was in high school, but the trouble is, to achieve that goal, just how will she affect the future and those who feature in it?

Here I Go Again is like the movie 17 Again. That’s the best way to describe it. It’s also a bit like the Alexandra Potter novel Who’s That Girl?. I absolutely LOVE plots like that. I LOVE time travel Chick Lit novels. Honestly, I adore the idea of being able to go back and change moments in time you aren’t particularly proud of and although Lissy’s reasons for going back in time weren’t exactly pure – wanting a better life than you’ve got because you were a cow in High School and thinking being nicer can change that isn’t exactly the best of reasons, really. But it works and it’s awesome. Like wow. When we’re first introduced to Lissy, she’s horrible. She’s the worst kind of airhead person who believes the world owes her a favour. But as the novel progresses and as Lissy realises the error of her ways and the error of her fixing the previous errors and the impact it has, Lissy actually morphs into someone I loved. It truly surprised me. Yes, she always has that biting side to her, that scathing can-come-out-with-anything side, but I dunno, I liked it, liked her.

One of the worst things that can happen with books like this though is that changing the past doesn’t change the future (or it does change the future, but only for the main character and nobody else) but Lancaster has thought this through and as such any changes Lissy makes do indeed have an after effect. I like seeing that, I liked seeing the consequences of someone’s actions, that their original actions may have occurred for a reason, or whatever. The novel doesn’t just have Lissy go and change her bad bits and have a happy ever after. Nope. There’s cause and effect and Lissy has to find a way to make her life be the way she wants it without ruining other people’s lives in the process. It’s actually trickier than you’d expect, y’know. It was like a puzzle that needed to be solved in the exact and proper way before you could truly see the end result and I enjoy every bit of it.

I just found Here I Go Again to be massively absorbing. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and I found it difficult to put down. I now see what the big draw is about Jen Lancaster. Man, can the woman write! She had Lissy down to a T and I loved the biting humour and biting wit and pop culture references, but I also liked the emotional side to it. Lissy wasn’t just a mean-girl-Rachel-McAdams robot. She had emotions and one bit in particular really made me cry. I semi saw it coming, but Lancaster’s writing is so good that it was as if I’d never knew it was coming if that makes sense. Lancaster is an utterly amazing writer, and I can see her having a huge career in front of her writing Chick Lit. She just knows what to write about that will reel people in. When I read the synopsis I was a bit gleeful about Lissy’s downfall, but it wasn’t that way AT ALL and that’s all down to the awesome writing. I am so glad I have Lancaster’s non-fiction back catalogue to go back to now because I can’t wait to read more from her. She’s a writing superstar.