Uptown Girl

by Holly Kinsella

[Leah]

When I received an email a few days ago offering me the chance to review Uptown Girl by Holly Kinsella, I took a look at the synopsis, took a look at the title and decided, yeah, why not? I love Billy Joel’s song of the same name, I loved the idea of Emma being a bit of a rich snob who learns that when it comes to falling in love you’re not necessarily going to fall for your same class, and that you may find love with a lowly mechanic! That is pretty much the novel in a nutshell and it’s a good plot, but I didn’t think it was as well executed as it may have been.

For starters, the novel was uber-posh. Everyone in the novel sounds like they’ve just walked off the set of Made In Chelsea, and the novel is very much modelled around that set, the posh set. The set who are snobs, perhaps, and think lowly of normal working-class people, and it shows. Emma wasn’t a particularly nice character; it’d have worked better if she didn’t just automatically judge someone because they were a grease monkey, if she didn’t refer to him as ‘the mechanic’ all of the time, she was a bit up herself if I’m being honest, and the way in which the novel was written often referred to her being fawned over by other men, as if she was utterly irresistible, something that always rubs me up the wrong way.

For a quick novella, it was an alright read. I’d have preferred less metaphors, more real talking than something being this or that; for example, Holly in one sentence loses herself when she laughs, but Kinsella then adds that maybe she finds herself instead and that sort of continues throughout the novel with many feelings being likened to its exact opposite meaning no-one seems to have any real feelings, it’s always this or that. But it was a quick, harmless read, perhaps a bit too posh for me, it’s definitely one for the Made In Chelsea fans who may appreciate the way the book is written a bit more than I did!