I really enjoyed this novel. Fun, silly, but clever, well-structured (pulled me along). Cared about the characters. Needed to pay attention to catch the embedded clues and they were coherent (which I appreciate). I like that the author tried to treat the women as human being and people. However, disappointed that all important characters were extremely beautiful or handsome. Once again, this nonsense where people seem to think there is no point writing about anyone who is not super-hot or making the characters’ looks so central to everything. Having said that, the author does observe that and send it up to an extent. It was also fun reading it 20 years after it was written, and seeing how it aged. The tech was surprisingly similar to now. Would love to have seen another book with this main character. Sad to see it labelled as ‘chick lit’ on GoodReads because that is a kiss of death kind of label.

I was HIGHLY disappointed when I read this. What a let-down from the author of Bridget Jones!

Just remembered I wrote this review back in 2007:

I was interested to see how a writer of such iconic books [Bridget Jones] would do outside her established area of success. Fielding obviously set out to make this book quite different: besides the occasionally omniscient third-person narration, Olivia is extremely unlike Bridget: focused on her career rather than finding love, and socially confident as well as secure in her looks. She's competent, skilled, and globally-minded. Instead of a romantic comedy, this is an occasionally comedic espionage thriller, starring Olivia the journalist as she uses her female intuition and social skills to investigate an al-Qaeda terrorism plot in a post-9/11 world of glitterati and hippie divers.

(as bizarre as that summary is, it gets bizarre-er. spoilers but you don't want to read this book anyway, don't worry.)

PROBLEMS:

1. The narration is terrible. Fielding really doesn't seem to grasp the inner mechanics of third-person narration — there's no build to it, no deeper insights, and the pacing is awful. In a diary, short and sometimes incoherent descriptions were germane to the format. Here they just make no sense. Sample painful description, from when our heroine is being held hostage underwater by an enemy and occasionally given air from a scuba tank to breathe: "It was crazy, but good." What?? She uses these dead words and outright telling all over the place, but her prose isn't minimalistic enough to justify it as a style choice. And then, and then, and then, and the tone doesn't change whether she's at a party or seconds from death. Relatedly, her description of action/suspense sequences are stilted and confusing. She doesn't give enough visual cues to explain wtf is going on, or make sense of her settings, and meanwhile Olivia's emotions are inaccessible and when we do know them, often seem inappropriate given the situation. Usually we're just told these thoughts, but occasionally we read her actual thoughts, which is always headdesk-worthy because when this happens, it's inconsistent: first she thought in the present tense, and suddenly she's thinking in the past. WHY?!

2. This book is pretty racist. Well, it's hard to quantify how racist the main plot is: Olivia meets a "dark" man who she immediately pegs for an Arab and a terrorist. Fielding hangs a lantern on it by having Olivia questions herself as being possibly racist, and her suspect claims that he was posing as not-an-Arab to escape that kind of stereotyping, but ... he really is a terrorist. Obviously this is ooky, particularly the "dark" descriptor that pops up several times, but given that it is a post-9/11 spy thriller, it seems somewhat of the Bond tradition where of course the enemy is going to be a dirty commie, or what have you. It makes for unsettling reading, however, and never gets better. Meanwhile, that's not the only kind of racism going on here: in a two-page sequence set in the Mexico City airport, Fielding packs in so many ridiculous stereotypes about Mexicans and Central Americans that in retrospect I'm not even sure why I kept reading. Mexican men wear cowboy boots! Mexicans are laid-back to the point where their airplanes regularly get lost because LOL QUE PASA? Mexicans don't care if there are problems, because Mexicans solve all problems with tequila! Similar hijinks ensue in Egypt and the Sudan, but I happened to pick up on this in particular because I have many ties to Mexican culture and have actually spent a lot of time in the real Mexico City airport, which is how I know for certain that this writing isn't just offensive, it's also...

3. BADLY RESEARCHED & IMPLAUSIBLE AS FUCK. There are so many incidental factual errors I caught in this book that I can only imagine how intensely wrong the last third of the book, which is a wildly unbelievable crash course with the MI6 and al-Qaeda, must be. Besides making MEX sound like a podunk bus stop (hint: it's the airport for the second largest city in the world, fuck no it doesn't have cowhide chairs), she even mentions Homeland Security's terror alert levels and yet allows Olivia to fly out of Miami the same day as a terrorist attack there, and continue to globe-trot via planes, and two different passports, despite a series of terrorist attacks that would, in the real world, ground air traffic for who knows how long. Apparently neither MI6 nor the CIA have any investment in remaining covert, as MI6 goes around informing all of Olivia's friends and employers that she's with them, and a CIA agent (who wields a lot of power within the agency, is a computer genius, and an undercover master of disguise) identifies himself as CIA onstage at the fucking Oscars in order to make an announcement anyone could have made. Adrien Brody's name is now Adrian, twice. And insult of insults: "In southern California alone we have major shipping ports in the Bay Area, Ventura, Los Angeles, and San Diego."

OH NO YOU DI-IN'T.

By the way, Olivia Joules has crazy hunches a lot, and they are (almost) ALWAYS RIGHT. Her overactive imagination is actually a keen intuition that, paired with social skills, is the reason why there should be moar female spies!! Oh the gloriously girly unorthodoxy!

4. Gender and sex fail. The premise, mentioned just above, is problematic, although I can see what I think Fielding intended: Olivia's instincts were written off as imagination because she was dismissed as a silly girl, when really it is her feminine intuition that gives her strength. So, okay, she's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer of spies. And she is rewarded, of course, with a hot spy boyfriend (the aforementioned important CIA wunderkind). I approved briefly, because who loves hot spysex and bossy men with guns? Oooh, me, me! Excellent, until he turns out to be such a condescending douchebag, who addresses her exclusively as "baby" once the hot spy bickering is out of the way, that I was ready to believe he was a double-crossing al-Qaeda agent, just because I hated him and couldn't believe that this jerk was supposed to be the happy ending.

I was quite surprised to find myself enjoying this book. Is it far fetched and ridiculous yes but that's actually what made the book so amusing and easy to read. A classic for the ages it's not but it also isn't trying to be.

Тежка простотия, която от малоумен чик-лит се превръща в дебилна псевдо-шпионска история, в която нашата мацка спасява света... ех!

I read this before when it came out and I have the same opinion now. It's well written because Helen Fielding is a lovely writer and smart and can create funny, likable heroines. Olivia as a character is great! I'm totally rooting for her. I like that she changed her name and the psychology behind who she is. If she'd stayed single it would have been a much more fun book. The Pierre Ferramo character is well written too in an ridiculous, over-the-top, cartoonish way. Meanwhile, this plot is daft, and not always in a good way - I guess that is what you get with trying to mix chick lit with terrorism in the first place, which really is a dumb idea. The unhinged story crams in too much silly action, while also lagging around the 1/3rd mark. Some of the action scenes seem like she was writing them purely for the movie version rather than serving the plot of this novel. Too many plot points: I think if she was revising it, less would be more. Was it because she was so famous at that time that they didn't edit her properly?! And Scott Rich is no Mark Darcy. He doesn't come to life on the page apart from looking like a serious "Eminem" according to Olivia (ew) with a packed torso and sounding all gung-ho and American then he saves the day and calls Olivia "baby" at the end, so she's meant to have that as her happy ending. Their relationship wasn't satisfying and seemed shallow and infantile. After all the set-up that we've had throughout the novel to show that Olivia can look after herself I was hoping for a feminist ending where she saves herself from Pierre, but no, Scott swoops in and saves her.

I also think H.F. should have had one or two characters of color that AREN'T baddies to even things out on the page. It's a very white, British book which does show some fear of the "foreign" I think.

I enjoyed these "Rules for Living" by Olivia Joules (stolen from another reviewer - thanks for typing out):

1. Never panic. Stop, breathe, think.
2. No one is thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves, just like you.
3. Never change haircut or color before an important event.
4. Nothing is either as good or as bad as it seems.
5. Do as you would be done by, e.g. thou shalt not kill.
6. It is better to buy one expensive thing that you really like than several cheap ones that you only quite like.
7. Hardly anything matters: if you get upset, ask yourself, "Does it really matter?"
8. The key to success lies in how you pick yourself up from failure.
9. Be honest and kind.
10. Only buy clothes that make you feel like doing a small dance.
11. Trust your instincts, but not your overactive imagination.
12. When overwhelmed by disaster, check if it's really a disaster by doing the following: (a) think, "Oh, fuck it," (b) look on the bright side and, if that doesn't work, look on the funny side.
If neither of the above works then maybe it is a disaster so turn to items 1 and 4.
13. Don't expect the world to be safe, or life to be fair.
14. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow.

Added during her adventures:

15. Don't regret anything. Remember there wasn't anything else that could have happened, given who you were and the state of the world at that moment. The only thing you can change is the present, so learn from the past.
16. If you start regretting something and thinking, "I should have done..." always add, "but then I might have been run over by a lorry or blown up by a Japanese-manned torpedo."

2.5 stars
Over the top ridiculous, this is a totally silly beach read type of book that’s all over the place to keep you turning pages. Part humor, part romance, and part Terrorism plot thriller (yes, you read that right).

Nothing like Bridget Jones, and at first I was okay with that and completely enjoying it, but suddenly it gets extremely unrealistic as an unlikely hero emerges from the kooky and quirky Olivia Joules.

If you like a very lighthearted read, or maybe you’ve been in a reading slump and need something to pull you out this might be the ticket. It’s easy, fast, and has multiple plots to keep you hooked. I listened while driving alone and it was okay for that as well, but honestly, the quality just wasn’t there for my type of book.

The cover: Enter Olivia Joules, fearless, dazzling, independent beauty-journalist turned master-spy - a new heroine for the twenty-first century. In Miami for a face-cream launch, she spots Pierre Ferramo across a room. Dangerously charismatic and undeniably gorgeous, with impeccable taste, unimaginable wealth and exotic international homes, he seems almost too good to be true. But what if Ferramo is actually a major terrorist bent on destruction, hiding behind an smokescreen of fine wines, yachts and actresses slash models? Or is it all just a product of Olivia's overactive imagination?

From the white heat of Miami tot the implants of LA, the glittering water of the Caribbean to the deserts of Arabia, Olivia pits herself against the forces of terror armed with a hatpin, razor-sharp wits and very special underwired bra.

I did enjoy reading the book. Sometimes funny, a bit absurd, chicklit and thriller at the same time. Although Olivia is a bit less hopeless then Bridget I couldn't get the image of Bridget Jones out of my mind whilst reading the book. And yes, Olivia sure's got an overactive imagination. I would have liked a bit more suspense and to my liking the story really is too unbelievable. That's why mu judgement is less generous, two stars.

Silly and lightweight but very entertaining.

“... A man who never makes a mistake never makes anything.”

Olivia Joules And The Overactive Imagination, Helen Fielding

~~~

I was looking for an easy to digest book to get me out of my slumpish mood and so I picked this book. Did I have high expectations? No. Given I've read The Bridget Jones Diary which I enjoyed but not as much as I had expected from other people's talk of the book.

So did this book have an 'I want to read more' effect? Yes, so much so that I was shocked.

Humurous, highly likeable heroine character with a crazy imagination but with a sense of morality and deepness can do that to you.

I agree that some part of the story at the start was a bit comme si comme ça but I became invested in Joules and her desire to be more than she already was to put the book down. And the fact that

The story was fast to read and enjoyed its short chapters.

I also enjoyed the commentary on life, Hollywood, a bit of terrorism...

Very quirky funny!

To be honest, I can't say that I had high expectations of this book when I started it. I picked it up at a Secondhand store mostly because I needed a new book to read and this one didn't look that terrible (and was one of the only English books in a Swedish store). Because it was from the author of Bridget Jones, I assumed this would be something similar, a romcom book thats just there to make you feel good, a nice read for the summer. And the beginning had me kinda annoyed with Olivia, just with her whole way of thinking. But the way this book unravels is very surprising and I feel like it's in line with the whole idea of the story. Very nice read, light and amusing but not your typical romcom story.