Fixie finds fulfilment by taking charge of her own personal and professional destiny. The will-they-wont-they tug of the romantic storyline is captivating, but ultimately this is a love letter to careers.
The reappearance of a subtly monstrous ex-boyfriend is written with great agility, and Fixie’s wrong turns are painfully relatable ones.
On first reading, it might seem as though Fixie has a stronger moral centre than many Kinsella heroines, but this is a book about bravery, and how standing up for ourselves and our desires can be the scariest, but most satisfying thing of all. Her family business is in bad shape, and her actual family is even worse. Heroine Fixie’s keen sense of duty is getting in the way of her need to make choices and live for herself. This is a powerful story about family, ambition and longing, cunningly disguised as a souffle of a romantic comedy. Simply put, her books are filled with warmth, empathy and emotional intelligence. Her best novels are wildly wise pieces of prose, masquerading as romantic comedies and we love that she treats her heroines’ relationship with work with as much interest and respect as she treats their love lives. They're conventional, in that they tend to be flawed, loveable and self-deprecating, but their willingness to embrace vulnerability and their enormous imaginations takes them to new heights. And to be honest we love all her heroines. Like her most famous heroine, Kinsella worked as a financial journalist before she started writing fiction and she even confessed to us that all of her own heroines "have a snippet of me somewhere". She's an Oxford graduate with a PPE degree, who published seven successful novels under the name Madeleine Wickham before she unleashed shopaholic Becky Bloomwood on the world.
She’s a master of satire, skewering trends and cultural pretensions, but always punching up. Kinsella is one of the most talented contemporary comic writers around.
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