Twenties Girl

Lara Lington is not happy about going to the funeral for the 105 year old great aunt that she barely knew. Lara has just been dumped by her boyfriend, and she is secretly still pining after him. Her best friend and business partner has run off to Goa and left Lara in charge of the floundering headhunting firm. Time spent with family is torture for Lara. She has to constantly lie to her parents about how she is over her ex and about how well her new business is going. Her sister is a condescending know-it-all. Her Uncle is an obnoxious coffeehouse mogul and millionaire. Her aunt and cousin are incredibly spoiled and snobby to say the least. Lara is ready to be done with the funeral and get the heck away from her family, but an unexpected person appears at the funeral; her great aunt Sadie’s ghost! Lara is the only one who can see Sadie. She appears, not as an old woman, but as her twenty three year old self from the 1920’s. At first Lara thinks she is hallucinating, but Sadie knows things that Lara’s imagination could never make up (like how to eat oysters and the meaning of “barney mugging”). Sadie is bent on haunting Lara until she has found something that was very important to her, a beaded dragonfly necklace that was in her possession until just before her death. Lara realizes that she can’t make Sadie go away, and her free spirited great aunt begins to grow on her. It isn’t long before Lara realizes that she might not want Sadie out of her life afterall. Lara becomes engrossed in the mystery of the necklace, and she begins to see that her family isn’t all they appear to be.

This book was nice light reading. I have read most of the books from Sophie Kinsella’s “Shopaholic” series. The character Lara has some qualities that remind me a lot of Rebecca Bloomwood (aka “the shopaholic) like her ability to delude herself. However the character Sadie was fresh and interesting. I was expecting the ghost to be terribly old fashioned, but Sadie is fun and a little bit wild. She gets Lara into all kinds of laughable situations. I’m a big fan of history and it was fun to think about how our world would appear to someone who’s coming from a 1920’s perspective. For instance, at one point Sadie complains about jeans. She says, “Blue! The ugliest color in the rainbow. I see the whole world, walking around with hideous blue legs. Why blue?” The mystery element is a new twist for Kinsella as well, I think. I got caught up in Sadie’s life history. I wanted to know why her family had ostracized her. I wanted to know why the darn necklace was so important to Sadie, and I wanted to know why someone had obviously stolen it from her. This is what I would call a “hamburger book” (as opposed to steak). It’s a quick, easy read. It’s not overly intellectual, but it was fun to read. It would have been a great one to read on the beach, but I happily spend my days with my sixth month old, so I read a lot of it while nursing. Que sera sera!