This is gutsily written, and highly informative when it comes to the ins and outs of running a refugee camp, and the difficulty of raising awareness and money when people aren’t seen to be “starving enough”. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that tackles the subject with quite such zeal. It was an eye-opener. And yet the storyline back in London, where the narrator gets involved in an emotionally abusive relationship with a media personality and rubs noses with all sorts of flamboyant (and almost universally dislikeable) slebs, sits uncomfortably alongside it. Both were well written, but despite the fact that having the celebs come over and support an emergency appeal was a key part of the novel, the two strands of the story felt horribly jarring. Maybe it’s significant that there is a nostalgic feel to the London sections with the yuppie culture (at its height when the novel came out), and that only recently have questions started to be seriously posed about “white saviours” and the focus on celebrities by organisations like Comic Relief. Either way, an informative read but one that never felt quite like a rounded whole.

I have always enjoyed Helen Fielding’s writing. Bridget Jones’s Diary is one of my all-time favourite books, but I think I loved Cause Celeb even more!! Rosie Richardson was a fantastic character. She was so relatable and likable. The setting of the story in Africa in the midst of a famine was eye-opening, and Rosie’s commitment to helping the refugees to survive was bold and admirable. I adored this book and it’s now right up there among the list my of my absolute favourites, right beside Bridget Jones’s Diary! If you like Bridget, I know you’re going to like Rosie! I highly recommend this book.

Distret

I’m a big Bridget Jones fan; so to celebrate 30 years of Bridget, I though I’d read Fielding’s preceding novel set in an African refugee camp in the mid 1980.
Using her experiences working with Comic relief, this is very much a novel of its time, although it tries to highlight the ethical issues surrounding aid and fundraising, and the hypocrisy of ‘star’ involvement in Fielding’s own fantastic writing style.
Our Bridget esque heroin Rosie is a elegant medium to poke fun at celebrity, 80s culture of aid work, sexism and real life scenarios; making this both a heartwarming and cleverly relatable story with real serious punch when it needs to. It’s a shame that more readers don’t know about this witty, significant and enjoyable read, which I couldn’t put down. A must for Brigit fans and fans of clever satire everywhere!

I had never read a book about this subject matter before. It seemed like I learned something about starvation in Africa but I know it was just the tip of a very large iceberg. It definitely opened my eyes. This book was a very quick read. Simple and to the point.

Ce livre n’a aucun intérêt. Il s’agit du 3ème livre que je ne finirai pas dans ma vie …

It's not quite as funny as Bridget Jones, not quite as adventurous as Olivia Joules, but for me, Cause Celeb has more heart, and truth, than any other Fielding book. The comedy is strange and honest. I wonder if Lena Dunham of GIRLS fame has ever come across this book, because Rosie and Dunham's Hannah character are cut from the same cloth.

The story is funny, gut-wrenching, loving, and inspiring. Fielding does an excellent job of posing some pretty serious questions to the reader including, what drives us to help, or not help, others? She's wrapped a human interest story into a fun, chick-lit book. I first read the book ten years ago and it continues to resonate with me to this day.

Absolut ingen bok för mig. Jag läste Bridget Jones tidigare av samma författare och tyckte den var helt okej. Men denna bok har ingen historia som intresserar mig så värst, för i princip ingenting händer. Seg att läsa och det enda jag tänkte under tiden var, hur många sidor är det kvar? Stilen fungerade i Bridget Jones dagbok, men i denna blir det för mycket och lite konstigt i denna sorts historia. Slutet blev lite bättre med betoning på lite.

I have mixed feelings about this book.
It's part chick-lit, with shallow characters and ridiculous situations, and part drama, describing a very serious humanitarian project in Africa.
The chick-lit part is nothing unique, there's the usual good-looking a**hole, who is incapable of having a functional relationship, and the woman who can't seem to break up with him, although she clearly sees she should.
The drama part is beautifully written, full of tragedy and satire, and there's some character development as well.
But somehow, the two halves just didn't come together for me.

Before there was Bridget Jones and her diary, Helen Fielding gave us Rosie Richardson. For some reason, "Cause Celeb" didn't hit the public consciousness in quite the same way as "Bridget Jones' Diary" did, so Fielding had to wait for the huge success she was to have. But having read the original "Bridget Jones' Diary" and enjoying it quite a lot, an investigation of Fielding's back catalogue seemed appropriate, even allowing for the disappointments that were "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" and "Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination".

It is 1985, a little after "Live Aid" and Rosie Richardson is stuck in a less than perfect relationship with Oliver Marchant, a TV personality and a not terribly nice chap. Following the break up of this relationship, she decides to head out to Nambula as a relief worker in the hope of a little peace and quiet. This is only a partial success, as while the people she is both working with and helping treat her better than Oliver Marchant, she has arrived in Nambula just before a crisis threatens to engulf the whole refugee camp. Rosie has to mingle her old life and her new one in order to help.

It's tricky to know how close to life the situation here is, so it's tough to tell how much suspension of belief is required. That said, given Fielding's history working with "Comic Relief" in Africa as a producer, it suggests she's seen this kind of thing in action and is writing at least partially from experience. Certainly both sides of the story; the self-serving interests of the celebrities living it up in London and the desperation and quiet dignity of the refugees in Africa do seem in keeping with what little I know of either. Ironically, most of my experience with the latter possibly comes from a Helen Fielding produced documentary,

Admittedly, as with all books of this type, there does seem to be a little bit too much happening, particularly towards the end, for it to be entirely real. However, much of it is well paced enough that you can imagine many of the circumstances as happening and this is certainly one of the more realistic examples of a chick-lit novel that I've read. Even in the London sections, Rosie's character isn't suddenly taking time out of nowhere and meeting for an all day chat over coffee or spending money that she has no obvious way of earning. Many chick lit characters have a lifestyle that would only happen to a Lottery winner or a wealthy person, whereas Rosie happens to have the kind of life that many of us actually could have. At least, for the most part.

Despite this realism, there are parts that don't sit quite right. Some of the characters from "Cause Celeb" are very similar to those from "Bridget Jones' Diary". Fans of the latter will note that Oliver Marchant is like Daniel Cleaver; Julian and Janey seem like some of the smug marrieds; Rhoda and Sharon could be swapped without much difference. Once these similarities become obvious, it starts to seem as if Fielding was just using this as a trial run for some of her ideas, mixing them in with some of real life experiences to turn them into a novel.

If you can put this to one side, however, as I was able to and as I'm sure Fielding fans will be happy to; this isn't a bad effort at all. It lacks much of the humour of "Bridget Jones' Diary", but given the setting for at least half of the novel, that's hardly surprising. What "Cause Celeb" also lacks is the over the top nature that was "Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination" and the forced feeling that pervaded "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason". "Bridget Jones' Diary" is a classic of chick lit that is unlikely to be easily bettered, by the same author or another, but "Cause Celeb" is comfortably Helen Fielding's second best novel.

If you've enjoyed Fielding's work before, this is a must read, purely to see her beginnings, which were actually quite impressive in their own right before being overshadowed. If you were as disappointed as I was after "Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination", this is the perfect tonic, showing that Fielding can write proper novels, not just diaries. If you're a fan of chick lit generally, this is also well worth a look on that basis, as the unusual setting of half the book makes it an interesting read, although many parts of the rest are fairly standard.

It's a book well worth supporting, so please read generously.

This review may also appear, in whole or in part, under my name at any or all of www.ciao.co.uk, www.thebookbag.co.uk, www.goodreads.com, www.amazon.co.uk and www.dooyoo.co.uk

Li 2 capítulos, percebi que não era para mim.

I'm conflicted about this book, and not just because it makes you question how you throw away food when the world is starving, and what real help looks like. It just doesn't do that very well.
I kept feeling like I was missing bits that were important, and then I started to think my book must be missing pages. Like a whole chapter right before the very end, for example. One minute Oliver is being himself and Rosie says people don't really change and the next moment, there's continually media attention, it's actually really annoying and stressful and then we're sleeping with O'Rourke and we're done. What did I miss here?

I like Rosie as a character, how she is able to take control of the situation in Africa and we see her growth through the awfulness that was Oliver. The cycle of the relationship is awful and real, although I'll be honest I have yet to work out what the heck Oliver really did (was he an actor, or a director or did he produce whatever Soft Focus was? Didn't really matter but whatever) it made sense to have Rosie stuck in the cycle of celebrity and love. Rosie can take control at the refugee camp, travel through warzones, deal with death everyday and yet Oliver still causes her to lose her footing years later. The book did a great job of showing this and how despite the intense struggle for survival, the affairs of the heart are highlighted and made even more sensitive.

Except it all fell apart for me once she went back to London and then got really confusing when they returned to Nambula with the celebrities. That just seemed like a bad party/press tour of craziness, and I found myself thinking that yeah she did need longer to organize it all. I'm, again, still confused as to what the program really was, there seemed to be some Shakespeare going on, but it was all kind of Band Aid/Live Aid, Comic Relief and pseudo documentary. The end was just kind of a shambles where everyone wants to adopt the twins, but the mother isn't really dead, and yet the guy on the phone keeps raving about how awesome it is to have a live death on camera and we haven't learned a thing here, but it doesn't matter because food is coming. Oh and the Safila camp is better off than the others going forward, and actually it always kind of was.
I feel like I am supposed to take something away from this book, but again, I don't know what.

Oh and what happened to the locusts?