Sweet Temptation

by Lucy Diamond

[Leah]

Maddie Lawson isn’t having a great time – her new boss Colette has humiliated her live on air with her new feature “Making Brum Beautiful” and has enlisted Maddie to join a Fatbusters club. Added to that, Maddie will also have to go live on air to discuss her ongoing weight loss. Maddie’s mum and children also get involved and after a disastrous Spots Day Race, Maddie realises something has to change. Colette may not have her best interests at heart but it could end up helping Maddie after all. At the first Fatbusters meeting, Maddie meets two other new girls: Lauren, who runs a dating website but has given up on love herself, and Jess, a beautician desperate to fit into a size 10 wedding dress for her wedding day. Can Maddie get her own back on Colette and use the Fatbusters class to her advantage? And what about the other two girls, can they make their own dreams come true, too?

I’m a huge fan of Lucy Diamond’s books. I managed to pick up her second novel Over You a couple of years ago for a euro which I thought was well worth picking up and I found that I really really enjoyed it once I’d read it. I was then offered a chance to read her third book Hens Reunited back when I first started the blog and I eagerly jumped at the chance and I enjoyed that just as much. So imagine my delight when her publishers offered us the chance of a proof copy of Sweet Temptation, her latest book, I wasn’t letting that go either. I received it in March but decided to wait a while to read it but I finally couldn’t resist, as it sounded great.

One thing I think Lucy Diamond excels at is managing to create fantastic female friendships. Over You, from what I remember featured some fantastic friendships, Hens Reunited was about three former friends rekindling their friendships and Sweet Temptation is no different. Here, Lucy takes three very different women and connects them via one medium: the Fatbusters club. Before each of the girl’s meet at the Fatbusters club, we’re introduced to Maddie who works at Brum FM. Her colleague Colette decides impulsively to being a campaign to Make Brum Beautiful and gives each of her colleagues – including herself – tasks to do over the Summer. Maddie’s task is to lose weight, much to her embarrassment when Colette announces it live on radio, and join a Fatbusters club. Maddie isn’t going to do it until an incident at her kids’ school sports day made worse when one of her children asks her outright if she’s going to die because of her weight. It shocks Maddie into action and she reluctantly goes along to the meeting.

Maddie goes along to the Fatbusters meeting and it turns out that she isn’t the only new member that night. There’s also Lauren, who runs a dating agency LoveHearts despite the fact her own marriage ended months earlier and then there’s Jess, a shy beautician who is desperate to be a slim bride for her fiance Charlie. All of the three girls then decide to meet up and become dieting buddies on the advice of Alison, the Fatbusters group leader. But will the girls become more than just diet buddies? As well as having to deal with trying to lose weight, the girls also have a lot of family problems to deal with which helps make the book a bit weightier than it might first seem!

Another thing Lucy excels at is giving us fantastic characters. I loved all three female lead characters Maddie, Lauren and Jess. I think Jess was probably my favourite of the three but they all had fantastic points and would make a great friend for anyone. I felt really sorry for Maddie as she goes through a heck of a lot throughout the book not least being humiliated on live radio by her colleague and she also has to deal with her mum who as well as “helping” her in her weight loss bid also appears to be suffering from some bad headaches. I thought Maddie was lovely and deals with everything really well. As I mentioned, Jess was probably my favourite of the three ladies. She seemed sweet and incredibly nice and I hated the way her boyfriend, Charlie, treated her. He didn’t seem to be a pleasant man and I truly wanted to punch him in the face. He had brought down Jess’s self-esteem no end and I so so wanted Jess to wake up and smell the coffee. I eventually liked Lauren, too, she came across as a bit hard-nosed when we first met her but she eventually thaws out and she definitely comes into her own. There are a few other characters but the book mainly revolves around Maddie, Jess and Lauren.

The book is very well written and is told from Maddie, Jess and Lauren’s perspective – they each alternate first-person narratives. It’s a very clever way to write the book as it means we get to know each of the three ladies very well. However, the only problem I had with Sweet Temptation is that the difficult situations appear to be rather glossed over. Because the book focuses so much on three different girls then not everything is able to be explored properly. I personally would have liked a bit more time dedicated to Maddie and her mum as I loved their interactions throughout the book and they seemed to have a great relationship. Bar that though I thoroughly enjoyed reading Sweet Temptation. The 400 pages fly by and it’s another great read from Lucy Diamond.

I hugely recommend Sweet Temptation – and the two other of Lucy’s books that I’ve read – and I look forward to see what Lucy is working on now. It’s also nice to see Lucy have a nice cover – I liked the Over You cover, but hated the Hens Reunited cover and now, she has a new design for Sweet Temptation which is quite nice. Sweet Temptation isn’t as light a read as it might sound (and look) and Lucy Diamond is a great new addition to the Chick Lit genre. If you haven’t already read one of her books then I recommend you go out and do that pronto particularly if you’re a fan of well written chick lit that centers on fantastic female friendships!