His Other Lover

by Lucy Dawson

[Leah]

Mia thinks of herself as a grown up. Her twenty-two-year-old sister, Clare, is once again in the death throes of an affair that was always doomed to failure. Mia now understands that relationships need work; that in an adult partnership, passion and spontaneity give way to something different but more lasting. With Pete she knows that her search for ‘The One’ can stop.

Until, tripping over Pete’s phone on the way to the loo one night, she reads a text message that sends her blood cold. Everything in it – its tone, the kisses at the end, Pete’s evasions about the sender ‘Liz’ – is wrong, and suddenly the blinkers are off. It’s time to get back in the game, and with everything to play for, Mia is about to discover a capacity for deceit she never knew she had.

After all, when Happy Ever After is at stake, any weapon at your disposal is fair game – isn’t it?

I absolutely loved Lucy Dawson’s debut novel His Other Lover. It’s dark chick-lit and it’s enjoyable. Sure Mia may come across as a tad bit unhinged but what would YOU do if you found out the man you loved was texting another woman?

I don’t think you can market Lucy Dawson as chick-lit, not really. Mia isn’t ditzy, there are no laugh-out-loud parts of the story – nothing you usually expect when people think “chick-lit”. It’s more about revenge and how far someone will go to keep the person they love.

Some of the things Mia does seems completely insane. From trashing the house and blaming it as a burglary to framing the other woman and making Pete believe it was Liz who did all those things. And yet I thought it was a brilliantly written novel. It’s also short – under 300 pages – which makes it all the more readable as well as being told in first-person.

All three characters have faults: Liz is sleeping with a man with a girlfriend, Pete is cheating on his girlfriend and Mia goes completely Bunny-boiler over-the-top in her bid to keep Pete. Liz started out as the villain but the real villain was Pete – even when found out he still lied and made it sound plausible that Liz was insane. I felt sympathy for Liz – even if she was the other woman, she believed everything Pete said.

I know Mia said she loved Pete but is a man really worth all of what she did? Really? But who really knows what they would do to keep the one they love? And that is exactly what Lucy Dawson explores. It’s an original story line because generally novels about cheating partners have them being dumped fairly sharpish. It’s telling it from the other side – what happens if, actually, you want to stay with the man?

I found the minor characters relief from the main plot – Claire, Patrick, Lottie, Debs etc. but they were really minor characters so it didn’t get away from the main plot for too long.

I wanted Mia to see Pete for what he was: a liar and a cheat but you would have to say they deserved each other what with the way she goes about lying and deceiving.

However that’s just a minor opinion I had on the book – I still enjoyed it regardless, an author rarely makes such an impact with a debut novel but Lucy’s was fantastic and I can’t wait to read more of her novels.

Rating: 5/5