21 September,2010 07:04 AM IST | | Amrita Bose
Author Katy Lawson would like us to believe that sharing almost the same name with another person can mostly work in your favour in her book Lessons in Love
How perfect would our lives be if only every moment we feel miserable or are fired from work or dumped by the love of our lives, we get a chance to exchanging our miserable existence with someone glamorous and rich and be happy forever.
But such are the dream-like, candy floss situations created in the world of chick lits, where down-and- out protagonists get the opportunity of a lifetime to become someone else and leave their misery behind forever.u00a0
Lessons in Love, will remind you a lot of the 2006 forgettable chick flick Music and Lyrics where the protagonists exchange their lives with each other in search of true love.
Jane Mills is a happy-go-lucky librarian who happens to open some mail addressed to a J Mills by mistake thinking it her own. Jane goes in search of the real Jayne Mills and ends up making friends with her.
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Jayne is rich, glamorous but very unhappy.
She wants to just take off on her own on an adventure andu00a0on a whim asks Jane to take over the business, live in her house and run the show in her absence. While Jane is still pondering whether to take up this delicious offer on, fate plays a cruel joke on her.
She is fired from her job for no fault of hers and worse her boyfriend Steve cheats on her with a woman who is to take her place at the library.
Jane decides to take on the opportunity while Jayne goes off on an adventure to the island of Kors in Greece all by herself.
Thus follows the parallel lives of Jane and Jayne with a bit of fraud, mistaken identities and a whirl wind love affair thrown in.
While the book has some light moments, it is clear that Lawson has written this book just like script keeping in mind the possibilities of turning this into a major motion picture in the future. Who knows what Hollywood might have in store for her?
None of the characters in the book endear themselves to you, not even the protagonists. The plot remains hackneyed and staccato.
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Except for some sunshine moments and the character of Gladstone, a tramp who moonlights as an IT geek and saves the day in the end , this chick lit is a one time read and quite forgettable.
Lessons in Love
Author Katy Lawson
Publisher Harper Collins
Pages 394, Rs 299
