Review: Things Are Looking Up

Things Are Looking Up by Maxine Morrey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Milly is a freelance fashion writer on her way to the interview of her life with British Vogue when her pre-occupation with her mobile phone leads to her being mown down by a London bus. Fast-forward a week and Milly comes out of a coma with cracked ribs, a broken arm, cuts and bruises. Worse, a week in hospital has meant that Milly has missed numerous deadlines and she has lost all her regular columns and writing work. Then to put a cherry on a really poobah week, her landlady serves her notice on the awful flat they share, because Milly clearly won't be able to pay the rent with no work coming in.

Only through her time in hospital does Milly realise that she has prioritised her career over friends, over family, and over love. But when the chips are down the only people there to support her are her family and her ex-boyfriend Jed.

I can only describe this as a mash-up/retelling of A Little Princess, with a smoosh of the film Overboard (which actually is probably a modern, grown-up version of A Little Princess anyway), a whisper of A Christmas Carol and just about every Hallmark movie ever made. Milly was clearly a 'bad person' pre her encounter with the bus, she even missed her nephew's sole speaking line at the school play. She is glued to her phone 24/7 and pays no attention to friends and family. Unfortunately, for me, Milly's road to enlightenment is less of a road and more of a doorstep. Within a day or two of waking up (it seems) bad Milly is no more and now we have caring sharing Milly who wanders around London with her eyes wide open seeing all the parts of London she never had time for before. She talks to random strangers on the bus and in a church (TBH at this point I suspected that there might be some woo-woo higher power at work, but luckily that fear was unfounded), she enters into conversations with the local bookshop owner and the Italian who owns the deli round the corner.

And now Jed, Jed is a self-made millionaire who devotes a lot of time to charity and other good works, he dates a super-model heiress and seems to work from home an awful lot. A self-made millionaire under the age of 30 who only seems to work part-time - He must be a unicorn.

I'm writing this with raging insomnia and so I am being particularly snarky but this novel relies on a series of coincidences to make things work. Is it really likely that one week in a coma would mean that Milly would have missed every single deadline, surely some of her columns would have been monthly? Is it also likely that the entire industry would completely blank her, even after she explained about the coma, and especially when she was always quick to help others out in the past (surely in the Hallmark film this is where all her former clients and mentees would turn up with offers of work, or at least a box of chocolates)? Then because of the aforementioned landlady and having no money and her brother having building work done the only place Milly can stay is in Jed's penthouse apartment? And there's more but I won't spoil things that happen later in the book.

Overall, this was a pleasant enough read, but totally predictable from start to finish, it needed more subtlety, more light and dark. The characters felt too one-dimensional. For example, Milly's brother confiscates her phone, rightly blaming her accident on Milly's obsession with emails and social media. But then later when she doesn't answer four calls from him he isn't the least bit concerned - if I called someone who was glued to their phone and they didn't answer/call me back within a few hours I'd be contacting the police!

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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