I love a bit of Marian Keyes, and ‘The Woman Who Stole My Life’ was hideously addictive – for both good and (sort of) bad reasons.
The good: I loved main character Stella. She was everything a normal human female is, and therefore someone whose journey you end up feeling quite personally. You want her to be happy, to resolve conflicts, to be successful…although, of course, you can’t always get what you want! Likewise Mannix was great, if a little confusing in his initial descriptions as to his looks (he later became the God of all things sexy, it was a little skewed from his early depiction!), and again an incredibly real character.
Which leads to the niggle of the bad, and yet a bad that is entirely addictive for its own reasons. There was not a single character outside of these pair that felt realistic; they were all stereotypes (the businesswoman, the artist, the hippy chick, the moody teen – you name it, it was there!) and selfish stereotypes at that. I was screaming at Stella throughout the book about how awful these people were to her, but as I’ve said this was addictive in itself for making you want to see her through to her own personal happily-ever-after to spite these selfish people! Perhaps they were this way to deliberately highlight the ‘right path’ and the ‘good life’ options facing Stella, but my God they made my blood boil in the process!
It was refreshing to see an honest portrayal of money; in books involving New York and potential high-level success, money often gets to be this magical object with no real limit, but this wasn’t the case here. For Roland and his debts, Stella and her ability to live in New York, Ryan and his karmic mission, all money had a value and a limit, and it was interesting to see how this created the stresses we all know and fear at times in our lives. Nothing in this book was unmovable but neither was it wiped away by unrealistic pots of gold or good fortune; this book is enjoyable because, at the core of it, it contains things we’ve all felt and worried about, and shows us the light at the end of the tunnel without blinding us.
It’s a fabulous night-time obsession, and ‘The Woman Who Stole My Life’ will not disappoint you when you inevitably look up and realise you forgot to sleep because you were too busy reading – just remember to keep blinking!
“One day, sitting in traffic, married Dublin mum Stella Sweeney attempts a good deed. The resulting car crash changes her life.
For she meets a man who wants her telephone number (for the insurance, it turns out). That’s okay. She doesn’t really like him much anyway (his Range Rover totally banjaxed her car).
But this chance meeting sparks a chain of events which will take Stella thousands of miles from her old life, turning an ordinary woman into a superstar, and, along the way, wrenching her whole family apart.
Is this all because of one ill-advised act of goodwill? Was meeting Mr Range Rover destiny or karma? Should she be grateful or hopping mad? For the first time real, honest-to-goodness happiness is just within her reach. But is Stella Sweeney, Dublin housewife, ready to grasp it?”
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