| Description: |
|
Amazon Review
Stripped Bare suffers from competing incompatible strengths rather than from any actual weaknesses. Lowri Turner has worthwhile insights about fidelity and moving on: of her three heroines, Olivia is coping with her husband's coming out and Beth with the discovery that her husband Richard has been sleeping with an aggressive and ambitious pole-dancing bimbo, while Siobhan is the Other Woman to a married couple. The nightmare that their professional lives become when the make-over programme they work on has inflicted on it a tyrannical new producer and a mimsy new presenter has some entertaining satirical touches--this would have been a better book if the occasional outbreaks of wild farce and decorative nightmare had been pushed further into the foreground. The sense here of now, and of a London of designer restaurants and inexpressibly expensive dress shops, is solidly imagined and at times gives us a real sense of what it is to be in love with the finest of clothes. All of this is good enough that one wants it to be more than a formulaic entertainment--and Turner always throttles back just at the point when she moves from the adequately competent and fluent to something more interesting. --Roz Kaveney
|
