Desperately Seeking Heaven

by Jill Steeples

[Leah]

Recently I’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch reading-wise. I think I’ve sort of read so many books recently that I’ve hit a Chick Lit brick wall. I’ve tried reading a couple of books, but neither have stuck and I sort of needed something to kickstart my reading again. So when Jill Steeples emailed and asked if I’d like to review her book Desperately Seeking Heaven, I jumped at the chance. I’d seen the cover previously and I adored it, and I couldn’t wait to get stuck into the novel, and thankfully it fared a lot better than the last two books I started reading!

Desperately Seeking Heaven reminded me massively of Cally Taylor’s fabulous debut novel Heaven Can Wait, but they’re not exactly carbon copies of each other, let me be clear. Ghostly Chick Lit doesn’t come around very often, though the Queen of Chick Lit herself, Sophie Kinsella, has written a ghostly Chick Lit novel called Twenties Girl (amazing, seriously). Chick Lit about ghosts seems to panic publishers because they don’t know what to do with it, but of the three I’ve read, they’ve all been pretty amazing, and I love nothing more than a Chick Lit novel that’s a bit different to the norm. Desperately Seeking Heaven was such a fun read, I thought, and I am so glad that I decided to read it. See folks, it proves that a beautiful cover WILL make you read a book.

The last thing Alice Fletcher is expecting when she leaves work one Friday night is to happen upon a car accident, and to find out that the person involved in that accident is none other than celebrity Jimmy Mack. But there’s something Alice is about to find out – Jimmy is dead, and Alice is the only person who can see him. Neither are quite sure why Jimmy has been brought to Alice, and as they set about trying to get Jimmy on his way to heaven, Alice realises it might be harder to let him go than she thinks. I thought the premise for Desperately Seeking Heaven was ace; the concept was amazing, the whole reasoning for why Alice and Jimmy could only see each other was beautiful, I adored Jimmy Mack and his mischievous ways, and Alice was a wonderful lead character. It was basically the most wonderful romcom I’ve read in a while. It was just so cute!

I really love Jill Steeples’s writing, she’s got the same kind of writing style as Kinsella, Paige Toon, etc, all my favourite authors, and it works so, so well. I admit, I probably would have liked a different ending, because I’m quite fussy like that, but apart from that it was a wonderfully quick read. It hasn’t pulled me out of my slump (I just know it hasn’t, sadly), so I think I need a change of pace (or a change of genre for a sec or two), but it’s definitely helped and it’s the first novel I’ve finished in a week and a half, though, granted, it took me a week to read it! Due to work scheduling, mind, not because I didn’t want to read it. It was a truly magical novel, with one of my favourite covers ever. Do give it a try, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with ghosts in Chick Lit, for some strange reason they work SO well.