Review: Who's That Girl?

Who's That Girl? by Mhairi McFarlane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I honestly enjoyed this read, with a few painful caveats. I won’t rehash the plot, as plenty of other reviews here cover that in spades. What I will say, however, is that author McFarlane took far too long to get things moving, then made some questionable choices in the denouement—choices that left me feeling a bit bitter, very cheated and just generally dissatisfied.

Main character Edith “Edie” Thompson is portrayed as a thirty-five year old woman who never really matured emotionally past the age of about twenty-one. She is self-deprecating, exceedingly insecure and is notoriously poor at assessing the character of those with whom she socializes. Her questionable life choices, and subsequent inability to self-reflect with any degree of success, dominates more of the novel than the relationship in which she becomes entangled and which, presumably, is the crux of the novel. I may have respected the story line more had the book been sold as an introspective narrative instead of a quirky rom-com. While her journey towards a deeper understanding of self is noble and at first blush has great potential, it is fraught with missteps and miscues that ruined the magic of the budding romance.

Overall, I wish the author had focused more on either Edie’s “coming of age” or the development of a romantic relationship with actor and heart-throb Elliott Owen. Either of these may have worked independently as the focus, but with the attention split between the two, both were found to be lacking in both breadth and depth.

If all this weren’t bad enough, this book featured more British colloquialisms than two East-Enders engaging in Cockney rhyming slang. Without my Brit husband to translate, much of the local dialect would have been lost on me, though I will admit to eventually just giving up and skipping past the local references. To have understood them all would have meant far too much work for a light read.

Three and a half stars, rounded down for the cheap ending.

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