Review: The Single Girl's To-Do List by Lindsey Kelk

Lindsey Kelk's first stand-alone novel tells the story of Rachel, a women in her twenties who has her life sorted. Or so she thinks. She has a long term partner, a well paying job as a make-up artist and a mortgage. Then her partner dumps her, she loses a significant amount of work after she insults a model and she has no idea how she is going to keep the home that she loves. Fortunately, her friends are there to help her get over her break up by creating The Single Girl's To-Do List, a long list of things that she needs to do to keep her mind off her ex-partner and to move forward. The only problem is, the list is intended as a joke, but Rachel can't stop doing the things on the list ... and she soon learns that life is much better when you start taking chances.

This book had a huge amount of potential, but is let down by the selfish, cynical main character and the near constant one-line jokes that simply aren't funny. Rachel has little empathy for the people around her, and treats her brother and her friends like dirt. Most of the supporting characters lack depth and it sometimes feels as though the moral to the story is that the road to happiness can be found through dying one's hair an extreme shade of red, eating a lot of fatty foods with an extremely limited nutritional value and making unnecessarily cynical wisecracks. (In short, I think I'm in the wrong market for this novel.) I also felt the book was let down by not exploring themes that should be important plot points--for example the entire novel builds toward Rachel attending her father's fourth wedding, yet her father remains an entirely absent figure in the book, even in the few paragraphs that are set at the wedding. Surely this would have been an interesting theme for the author to explore? How was Rachel's view of relationships influenced by her father? Did he have any advice for her?

Early on, I contemplated leaving this as a DNF but the plot was just interesting enough to keep me reading. 

Not really recommended. 

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