Review: The Little Lady Agency

The Little Lady Agency by Hester Browne

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I liked this book, but not enough to reread it. It's a cliched chick lit novel, and while I did find it funny, it was not unique enough or interesting enough to stand above the chick-lit crowd.



When I was nearly done with it, my husband asked me if this book was a "trash novel." (This is what he calls mass market romance novels.) I had to tell him no. While there is a romance in the novel, it's a secondary feature of the story. This is, primarily, the story of how an underprepared woman attempts to make a dignified living in London.



As with so many other chick lit novels, our protagonist, Melissa, is in her mid-to-late twenties and worried about becoming a "spinster." She's been unlucky in love, and her younger sister is getting married, thereby throwing Melissa's status into relief. Melissa believes she's fat when everyone around her knows that she's really just sexy and curvy. She's just been fired ("made redundant" is the term her office uses). Melissa lives with her best friend and confidant, Nelson, in an entirely platonic situation. Of course, everyone thinks they're dating, but, really, they're not. Finally, she's struggling under a crippling debt.



Sounds familiar, doesn't it?



This book tries to make itself unique by placing Melissa in a situation over which she has no control--her father is a Member of Parliament, and he's the one that loaned her 10,000 pounds. Unable to find a job, and unprepared to work in any real situation, when Melissa is offered a job working for a former teacher, she jumps at the chance. She thinks she's going to work as a companion, only to find out that this is a prostitution ring. Shamed and horrified, Melissa opens a business of the kind that she thought she was going to work for--becoming a "little lady" to organize men's social lives and fill the role of the missing women in their lives (no funny business, though). To protect herself and her family, Melissa recreates herself as "Honey" using a blonde wig.



Of course, identity crisises loom as well as desperate situations that belong in a sitcom like Three's Company rather than a novel. I liked Melissa well enough, but her retro feminity reminded me of nothing so much as Susan J. Douglas' analysis of what she calls the "New Girliness" in her recent book Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism's Work is Done.



I'm a tough audience for chick lit. While I do like it, I need it to have something outstanding--writing, characters, plot--to make me forgive its problems (as well as the typical sexism). Unfortunately, this book did not rise above the pack in any meaningful way. I don't necessarily regret the time I spent reading it (there were a few good jokes, after all) but I won't give any of my time to the sequels.



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