New Beginnings

by Fern Britton

[Leah]

When Christie Lynch’s husband Nick dies suddenly, her entire world is changed and she finds herself going from happily married mother of two to single mother of two. Christie’s life takes an unexpected turn upwards, though, when she’s offered the chance of joining panellist show Tart Talk. From there, Christie’s life is continually on the rise as she finds herself presenting on top show Good Evening Britain. Suddenly, she has the money to treat her two kids Fred and Libby and she’s able to begin the repairs on her falling-down house. But as Christie becomes more in-demand as a presenter, her home life begins to fall apart as she finds she has little time to devote to her two kids. Life is further complicated when she meets Richard. Can Christie keep her personal life and her professional life separate and when push comes to the shove, which will Christie choose?

I must admit, when I heard Fern Britton was writing a Chick Lit novel, I wasn’t entirely interested. Over these past couple of years there’s been an influx of celebrities deciding to try their hand at Chick Lit (why they don’t write a crime novel I’ll never know…): Coleen Nolan, Sharon Osbourne, Martine McCutcheon, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson so it just seemed that Fern was following in their footsteps trying to cash in a quick buck by writing a novel. I know it’s wrong of me to lump all of the celebrities into the same bucket, but for the most part they do just seem to be in it for the money than any real desire to be an author. Not that that’s stopped me from reading celebrities novels, of course (I do have to see if they’re worth reading after all). So when New Beginnings by Fern arrived in my mailbox I was intrigued. I wasn’t looking to read it, just to take a peek at the first page, but I ended up getting stuck into it.

New Beginnings is an age-old tale of home life versus working life as Christie finds herself plunged into the world of TV presenting after a stint on Tart Talk where she goes to talk about her recent bereavement. Christie then find herself taking over for Gilly on Good Evening Britain when she leaves to have triplets and all of a sudden, Christie is the new nations sweetheart, helped along by agent Julia Keen. Meanwhile, though, her life with her kids suffers as she find herself rushing around with no time to spare due to her new commitments. I must admit, when I first heard about Fern writing a novel I assumed she was going to base it entirely on herself. As we all know, Fern is most famous for hosting This Morning until she left in 2009, and that’s the route I thought she’d take the book in. She doesn’t, as Good Evening Britain is an evening magazine show but there are similarities and Fern has obviously drawn on all of her TV experiences in her life to put into her novel.

I was very pleasantly surprised with the book. Yes, Fern has set it unadventurously in the TV world, but she’s done a good job of it. It doesn’t read like an auto-biography, although I haven’t exactly followed Fern’s career so I may be wrong. For me, I could easily forget it was written by Fern Britton and I just enjoyed the story for what it was rather than who had written it. There’s nothing worse if you judge a story before you’ve even read it, unless it’s written by Katie Price. So I went into the book with an open mind and thoroughly enjoyed getting an in-depth look into the TV world. Because Fern has spent so long in TV, she has plenty of stories she can tell and put into her writing that a lot of people can’t, and which most authors would instead have to rely on research for but because Fern has on-hands experience it makes the reading all the better.

The characters are as you’d expect them to be. I liked Christie although I thought she could be a bit tactless at times (the whole Christmas Day incident was a bit embarrassing to say the least) and her lack of “Oomph” when it came to showing her agent who really was the boss was a bit annoying, but for the most part I liked her. Christie’s mum and sister Mel feature regularly; her mother’s a bit bossy and snooty but I liked her sister, Mel, she was lovely and the perfect tonic at times. I liked Christie’s two kids, I thought they were very well written and perceived. Along the way Christie acquires many new friends, gay-best-friend Frank who was a totally cliched doll; her uber-agent Julia who was a bit of a cow and Richard, a single man with a son who lives near Christie. I quite enjoyed the mixed bag of characters, there was someone for everyone in there it has to be said.

New Beginnings didn’t exactly blow me away, but I did enjoy the read nonetheless. I wanted to continue Christie’s story and see how it would all pan out and I thought the ending was very intriguing. It was totally and absolutely easy to see how it was all going to end, particularly pertaining Julia but I liked how it was all built up despite the less-than-satisfactory and very-easy-to-guess conclusion. One thing that always fascinates me is the names of the shows because whenever TV is written about in a novel, there’s never any ITV or BBC or This Morning, it’s always TV7 or Channel Six and it does make me cringe a bit. I’m not sure if there are laws against using names like ITV, but I’d like authors to be a bit more imaginative! Nevertheless New Beginnings is worth a read. It’s very easy to read and I assume Fern wrote it herself, and I definitely believe Fern could have a career as an author, I’d certainly read more of her work. It just goes to show, there are some celebrities who are able to write a good novel. Personally, though, I do think their books would be more well-received if they wrote them under a pseudonym, but that’s another story… Either way, you won’t be disappointed with Fern’s debut effort.