2008-07-08 Reclaiming what was once you

"I was a normal girl with frizzy hair and snaggle teeth and a crap boyfriend. And a fairly crap job, and friends who I had a laugh with, and a cozy little flat." - Lexi Smart

"I gaze into the mirror and my twenty-eight-year-old face stares back. How on earth did I get from me ... to her?" - Lexi Smart

Sophie Kinsella is author of the enormously humorous - and frivolous with a capital "F" - SHOPAHOLIC series starring Becky Bloomwood, spendthrift shopper extraordinaire. I know; I've read them all. In REMEMBER ME?, Kinsella takes a more sobering, but just as enjoyable, tack. I devoured it over the July 4th weekend, stopping only for unavoidable chores that I couldn't unload onto the wife.

Here, the heroine is Lexi Smart, who awakens in a hospital bed several days after suffering a severe crack on the head. To her dismay, the past three years of her life are totally forgotten. During that period, she had apparently morphed from a fun-loving but unremarkable, low-paid drone in Deller Carpets, where she worked with her chums Fi, Carolyn and Debs while dating Loser Dave, into a gorgeous, poised and driven senior executive of the same company and married to Eric, a handsome and charming multi-millionaire property developer. Her new existence contains everything beyond her wildest dreams, if only she could remember how she got them. But, as she gets acquainted with her "new" self, her apparently ideal lifestyle begins to show frays around the edges that threaten to unravel towards the center. Perhaps it's not so perfect? Indeed, Fi, Carolyn and Debs now snub her horridly. And what is Eric's reference to "Mont Blanc" all about?

For the reader who may wonder where life went wrong and wishes one could go back again, REMEMBER ME? demonstrates that, at least in fiction, it can be done. Like Becky Bloomwood, Sophie conjures Lexi with a fierce affection for the persona while putting her in situations that threaten to spiral deliciously out of control. Like Becky, Lexi has the core intelligence, goodness, and strength of character to muddle through.

Kinsella writes chic-lit par excellence. But even this male continues to be charmed.