Twentysomething, magazine journalist Jane has enough stress--breaking up with her boyfriend, falling in love with a man who leaves the country the next morning and the spare tyre around her waist--without the added headache of the glamorous socialite Champagne D'Vyne, who pops effervescently into her life and proceeds to sour everything as their lives become inextricably intertwined.

Meanwhile, her best friend Tally's crumbling ancestral mansion in Lower Bulge is about to be sold off unless Jane can find a rich knight to come to Tally's rescue and, while she's at it, nab one for herself. The reader is launched into the world of double-barrelled socialites like the Front-Bottomes and Uppe-Timmselves, and the offices of the "Gorgeous" and "Fabulous" magazine worlds where only girls with slim calves and tinted bikini lines get onto the front covers.

Simply Divine sparkles with Wendy Holden's sharp, acerbic wit as she bursts the bubble of high society's extravagant pretensions and leaves the reader choking at some of her more shocking sentiments:

"How could [Tally] see that far? ... This honing of the optics came, Jane imagined, courtesy of the genetic inheritance of generations of Venerys scanning the horizons of their vast acreage. Being grand, however, had its downsides too. Like the girls at Fabulous, Tally had always suffered the most agonising of periods. Blue blood was evidently more painful."

Wendy Holden holds nothing back in her outrageous satire on the rich and frivolous, from psychics to New Age ceremonies to modern, "glossy" bibles, she exposes the shallowness behind the façade --Nicola Perry

2008-02-11 Good fun

First, keep in mind one thing: chick lit is about one thing, and one thing only - escapism. This is not literature by any stretch of the imagination. This is meant to make you get mad at the over-privileged girl, identify with the down-trodden girl, be happy that she gets her man in the end - and hopefully laugh out loud a lot along the way.
So, with this working definition of chick lit in mind, this is really good. It's funny, it's fairly fast-paced, there are a couple of decent twists and turns, and the "evil" character is absolutely hilarious. Some people may find it predictable but, again, this is chick lit: it's not meant to keep you in wild suspense.
Read it like you watch your favorite soap operas!