It Happened In Paris
by Molly Hopkins
Sphere, pp480
ISBN: 978-0751544596

Meet Evie Dexter, a 24-year-old blue-eyed brunette who walks the walk and talks the talk. Yet having been recently made redundant, Evie is hunting for a job to keep up with her lavish London lifestyle.

Her handsome Greek friend Nick offers to help by giving her a few nights a week to waitress at the family bar, after trying to induce her to join the gym, which would earn him three months of free subscription.

Evie’s flatmate Lulu, balances her hectic work life as a nurse by betting on expensive antiques on e-bay and drinking like there’s no tomorrow. Despite her obsessive craving for chocolate, Lulu’s biggest ambition is to slim down to size zero overnight, so that she can marry some upper class aristocrat and thus end her nightshifts at the hospital.

Then there’s Evie’s older sister Lexy. Being a wife and a mother of twins, you would think Lexy has more sense and sensibility. However, this does not seem to be the case as she thinks she can hand over her daughters to her sister any time she wants just so that she and her husband can enjoy a kids-free weekend. Evie’s nieces, Becky and Lauren, pose as the conscience mirror, the former being described as the devil’s spawn and the latter as the fair-haired angel.

When Evie is hired to work as a travel guide, having lied through most of her CV, those around her are pretty sure she will not be able to pull it off. And in fact, when she sets off for her first trip, dragging her luggage in the wee hours of the morning, it looks as if her newfound career is on the road to sabotage as she realises that she has left her hand luggage containing her cash, passport and make-up on the bed in her apartment.

Enter Rob, a Brad Pitt look-alike (according to Evie and her elderly clients), who is going to drive Evie and her clients around for the weekend. Rob’s pseudo comic hero qualities soon kick off as he has to save Evie from border control. Not only that, but he also has to lend her cash and buy her expensive Chanel make-up. Evie’s gift of the gab and her penchant for telling fibs pay off spectacularly as she wins over all her clients and sells all her excursions. Author Molly Hopkins stretches Dexter’s good fortune even further as she manages to get Rob to spend the rest of the weekend in her hotel room.

However, after three weeks of eternal bliss spent between time with Rob and working weekends in Paris, Evie’s good karma experiences a turn around as she is mugged and injured in broad Parisian daylight. She is rushed to hospital where part of her hair is shaved due to a gash in her head and her body has to be meth-induced. Her friends and family’s concern for her is soon put to the test as she needs round-the-clock care.

Ms Hopkins’s description of Evie’s clients as fogging the hotel lobby with their scents of sandalwood and lavender borders on the repetitive and her constant references to expensive brands don the novel with a consumerist air of superficiality. In spite of Ms Hopkins’s efforts to lend a serious side to her heroine as she tentatively makes her way to cultural visits around Paris, which she apparently knows a lot about, this never comes through. Yet the novel’s hilarious aspect is resonant and readers should be careful, especially if reading it in public, as laugh-out-loud moments abound. Ms Hopkins’ descriptions of Evie’s romantic ventures, especially those in bed, are truly comical.

The narrative alternates between the writing of a demented drunk on a fast track to rock bottom and the diary of a level-headed sensible and somehow brainy 24-year-old making it on her own in the world. Evie’s lack of resilience towards her love of alcohol, which not even a new job can deter her form avoiding, makes one ponder where her responsibilities lie but then again this is pure chick-lit at its funniest, a reminder not to take anything seriously and definitely not to imitate at home.

• Ms Gatt is a teacher of English at St Augustine College for Boys and has an MA in English in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Literary Theory.

This book is available at Word for Word.