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Poppy is the main character in this novel. She’s a typical Kinsella heroine: feisty, generous, kind.. and somewhat impetuous. I couldn’t help liking her. We meet her when she’s panicking about having lost her engagement ring. She has been at a gathering of her closest friends, prior to her wedding, in a hotel. One of them badgered her to borrow the ring to try it on, and Poppy was too generous to refuse. Then it got passed around, and she kept her eye on it, but events overtook them… and the ring vanished.
As the hotel is being cleaned, she goes outside to try to get better reception for her phone… and that vanishes, too, stolen by a hooded individual on a bike. And now Poppy’s really stuck, as she can’t contact anyone or access anything. A phone in 2012 (when this book was first published) didn’t have nearly as much important information as today’s smartphones. She probably didn’t have many photos, or any banking apps. On the other hand, they weren’t usually secured by passwords.
Then Poppy sees another phone in a rubbish bin. She’s a bit dubious about picking it up, but she figures it’s been thrown away, and she’s only borrowing it. It’s a business phone that was previously used by someone called Violet, as she quickly discovers, and she’s able to use it to contact various people. Evidently she has a good memory for numbers.
The bulk of the novel covers several strands in Poppy’s life. She meets her prospective in-laws, and finds them intimidating. They are all serious academics with publications in journals, and she is a physiotherapist. She tries to hide some of her ignorance, and falls into deeper and deeper problems as they expect her to be an expert on topics where she has barely dabbled. She feels very inferior.
She also spends a lot of time trying to trace her lost ring. It was a family heirloom, and probably very expensive. She also has to find creative ways of hiding from her fiancé Magnus and his parents that she doesn’t have it.
And then there’s Sam, a businessman whose email and messages are going to Poppy’s borrowed phone. Violet was his PA, and she left her job abruptly after receiving a better offer. Sam wants the phone back; Poppy is using it to help organise her wedding, and agrees to forward all his messages on to him. But she can’t help being curious and starts reading them. Some of them are personal, and she realises that he tends to write very abrupt replies, or even ignore messages. So she starts answering some of them herself…
It’s all cleverly done, with excellent writing and some very amusing dialogue. I smiled several times and even laughed aloud at one quip which I wasn’t expecting. I loved the tentative friendship that starts up between Poppy and Sam before they even meet, despite initial disagreements. I also liked the way that she starts confiding in him. It’s much easier to talk to someone she barely knows than to her friends (many of whom don’t even like Magnus). She can see that Sam has many faults - unlike the almost perfect Magnus - and doesn’t mind acknowledging hers, at least sometimes.
Some of the people are caricatures, but done in a mostly positive way. Poppy and her two colleagues at work seem entirely believable, as do both Magnus and Sam. Reality has to be suspended, and Poppy accepted for who she is with all her flaws. I can’t see myself ever doing as she does in any respect, but my personality is very different. The various subplots weave together seamlessly, all very cleverly done.
There’s a fair amount of business conversation, but that, too, was so well written that I didn’t find myself skimming or unable to understand. There are some quite stressful chapters, some deeply moving scenes, and overall a thoroughly enjoyable book that’s easy to read (I finished it in just two days, despite it having over 450 pages).
Definitely recommended, if you like this style of slightly over-the-top light women’s fiction.
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