I've Got Your Number book review

Kindle edition

I've been an avid fan of Sophie Kinsella ever since I first read Confessions of a Shopaholic (published in the UK as The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic) and identified a little bit too much with Rebecca Bloomwood. Since then, I've read almost all of Kinsella's books (the only ones I haven't read are the ones she originally published under a pen name and is now re-releasing under her own name). I've enjoyed them all and I've Got Your Number is no exception*.

By now, I've got Kinsella's formula down to a science. This isn't necessarily a bad thing and in fact, I like that I know what I can expect. This especially helps in the middle of the book when I'm getting really frustrated at all the crap that's going down, until I realize that this is Kinsella. It's going to have a happy ending.

So, Poppy Wyatt, as the typical Kinsella heroine, is more your average Jane. She, like the others, is someone you can identify with...she's not the prettiest nor the smartest, but a likeable, plucky girl. Enter the mishap that screws it all up: she loses her engagement ring. Things go from bad to worse, to a little bit better, than worse again, than really, really, really worse and that's when you know you're somewhere in the middle of the book and the beginnings of a happy ending are just around the corner. There's the usual Kinsella hero...slightly rough around the edges, but actually a rather decent bloke underneath it all.

I have to give it to Kinsella...she almost had me. There was a moment (I won't spoil it) when I was absolutely perplexed and could NOT believe it was going to end this way...and so I kept reading, keenly aware of the little % bar at the bottom of the Kindle screen telling me that I still had quite a bit to go. That gave me hope but I was still clicking the "page next" button a little too quickly.

As with some of her other books, Kinsella seems to ask you for a certain level of "suspension of disbelief". Is it a little convenient that she finds a mobile phone in a rubbish bin? One that works? One that embroils her in a corporation's internal politics? Is it a little too much to ask the audience to buy that she's able to keep the phone for as long as she does and get away with even half of what she gets away with?

Probably.

But if you let Kinsella tell her story, it doesn't really matter. She has you turning the pages and rooting for Poppy all the way. All in all, I've Got Your Number is everything I go to Kinsella for and she does not disappoint. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who has enjoyed Kinsella in the past and perhaps for readers, like me, who used to read Meg Cabot as a teenager.

Nitpicking: I don't know how the actual hard copy is formatted, but the one issue I had with the Kindle edition was the footnotes were poorly done. In fact, they were not footnotes. They were endnotes. I was confused what the numbers throughout the chapters meant, not expecting footnotes in a work of fiction. Then when I got to the end of the first chapter, I realized that the numbers matched up. (Yes, I went to college...) I tried to read a footnote once, but I couldn't get back to my spot without some rapid page-turning. After that, I gave up and barely gave the footnotes any attention. It would have been better had I been able to actually read the footnotes as footnotes.










*Twenties Girl is probably my favorite. :)