Flapper, yes sir, one of those.

Twenties Girl
Sophie Kinsella

There are a few things I love in life:

1. Chick lit
2. The Roaring Twenties
3. Ghost stories

Sophie Kinsella's latest novel covers all three: Lara Lington, 27, isn't really upset when her great-aunt Sadie dies at the age of 100. She never really knew her, and the Lington family (of Lington's Coffee fame) isn't terribly close-knit. In fact, nobody's really visited Sadie for years, though they all go to her funeral and pretend to be sad. It's at the funeral that Lara runs into a mysterious girl decked in beads, who insists that she's been robbed of a beautiful dragonfly necklace. Nobody else can see her but Lara--and it turns out this flapper is the ghost of Lara's Aunt Sadie!

Sadie isn't a typical great-aunt. She's saucy and imperious, and she basically orders Lara to suspend her life in order to find the missing necklace. The girls fight and sleuth and fall in love with the same man, which causes a little tension. But ultimately, they help each other.

"Has anybody seen my [necklace]?"--a joke five people will get.

Kinsella wrote this book after a friend challenged her to write a ghost story, and damned if it isn't a cute idea, but after I put this book down, I was left with the feeling that it could have been so much more with a little more effort on Kinsella's part. For all that Sadie directs Lara to don vintage dresses and feather boas to romance her new beau, we don't really get a sense of what the '20s must have been like, really, which I think was what Kinsella intended to do. I found Lara's rich family repugnant, which Kinsella also intended, but it was taken to an uncomfortable extreme, because in the end, I didn't like Lara much, either. Maybe it's just me: if my dead ancestor from one of my favorite times came back from the dead to chill with me, I'd be ecstatic (if a little worried about my sanity) and I would wholeheartedly devote myself to hanging with her. But--maybe not if it was Sadie, who isn't really all that likeable, either.

And these characters really need to be likeable. Kinsella's previous works (The Shopaholic series, Can You Keep a Secret?, The Undomestic Goddess) have featured far-fetched plots that only work because you love the characters. You don't mind Becky Bloomwood dating a guy for his money or her shallow materialism because you like her. I didn't like Lara. I barely noticed her. She could have been called "Protagonist" and it wouldn't have changed things. While I feel that Kinsella took a fair amount of time to create her previous characters, I feel like she didn't think a whole lot about the character of Lara, and in fact this whole book feels a little rushed. Earlier today I accused Jacquelyn Mitchard of phoning it in, and now I think I'm going to accuse Kinsella of the same thing.

And at times Kinsella takes her trademark silliness to extremes. There's a scene, early on, where Lara and Sadie realize that once Sadie is buried, she'll disappear, and they'll never solve the mystery. So Lara goes to the police station, and accuses a nurse at Sadie's home of murder. I can suspend disbelief when Becky tells her parents that her bank manager is stalking her, or when Lexi Smart (heroine of Remember Me?) wakes up with sudden amnesia, but I cannot stomach someone going and falsely accusing someone of murder, and the cops just pooh-poohing it when she's caught in her lie. And then it ends up not mattering really if Sadie's body is buried or not, because the plot point is never really dealt with again, and you get the distinct idea that Kinsella's editor told her to punch the story up by a few thousand words, and that was where she decided to stick them.

But overall, I can't hate, or even say that I disliked this book. I read it at a time when my brain was swiss-cheesed by nonprofit tax law, and I didn't put it down until I'd finished it, and I didn't wish for my money back, though I did wish that perhaps we'd gotten a greater sense of Sadie's life before she was dead, and that some of the stupider moments had been omitted. This book is a little like if you were a middle school English teacher, and you told your students to write a paper on the Pelopponesian War, and they turned in a really interesting short story on mice done entirely in limerick style. It's not what you wanted, but it's OK, and you have to give them partial credit, at least, for creativity. At the very least, I appreciated a chick lit that wasn't all about getting a man, having a baby, or planning a wedding. It was nice for a change, even if it wasn't all I wanted it to be.

Rating: 2.5 of 5 stars.