Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

Becky Bloomwood has it all. She's beautiful, stylish beyond belief, has an enviable job as a financial expert on a British television show, and is the girlfriend of a wealthy, handsome advertising executive. She has bought enough merchandise to cause her bank manager to write to her daily about her overdrafts, and now she's about to fly to New York to buy more and more. As she reads the story of Becky's addictive sprees in the world of designer fashion, Emily Gray is inseparable from the heroine. Her voice is lyrical, and she smiles as she speaks, adding just the right proportion of brightness to the piece. In staying wholly involved in the narrative, Gray makes all of Becky's gains and losses easier to bear. J.P. 2004 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

December 10, 2001
The world is a different place since Helen Fielding triumphed on both sides of the Atlantic, but the torrent of benignly self-indulgent Bridget Jones's Diary
knockoffs has not subsided. In this sequel to Kinsella's bestselling Confessions of a Shopaholic, Becky Bloomwood, a personal finance "expert" with her own TV show, is more of a financial mess than ever: she can't stop shopping, even though she can't afford anything. She's even assigned her flatmate, Suze, to monitor her spending, but to no avail: Becky is full of cute rationalizations, like "Foreign money doesn't count, so you can spend as much as you like," and can't stop herself from sneaking into posh boutiques. Her work-obsessed boyfriend, Luke, runs a financial PR agency, and when he gets the green light to open an office in New York City, he brings Becky along. Upon her arrival in the Big Apple, she euphorically discovers Barney's, Saks, Sephora and sample sales—but when wind of her shopping excesses gets back to the British press, she loses both her relationship and her TV job. Becky manages to save the day in predictably winning fashion, with plenty of comic moments along the way. Sure, it's tongue-in-cheek and all in good fun—but will the barrage of shopping hijinks be enough to hold readers this time around? Kinsella creates some winning characters, but the credit card and shopping bag action is wearing dangerously thin.