Tallaght Echo
Marian Keyes has come up trumps again with her fifth novel, Sushi for Beginners. Having four best sellers under her belt in a relatively few short years, Keyes is not one of this country's best-loved writers. Sushi for Beginners has three leading ladies - Lisa Edwards, Ashling Kennedy and Clodagh Kelly. Lisa is a London magazine editor who expects to be offered a glamorous job in New York magazine. To her horror, her new job is in Dublin, setting up and launching Colleen magazine.
With her marriage in tatters, Lisa finds some consolation in her new boss, Jack Devine. But as far as she is concerned, Dublin is a pretty hick town. It rains all the time, the perks she has been used to in London are practically non-existent and she has to pull out all the stops to get the magazine up on its feet.
Ashling Kennedy gets the assistant editor job at Colleen - to her amazement. She is very unused to working at the pace Lisa sets. But Ashling has her own problems as well - getting a boyfriend, meeting up with a bunch of stand-up comedians and there's a homeless boy camping out on her doorstep.
She gets the nickname Little Miss Fix-it as she always has a ready supply of tissues, Band-Aids, headache tablets in her handbag. But there is a reason in Ashling's past for all this organisation.
As far as she is concerned, her friend Clodagh has the life of Reilly - gorgeous husband, two kids, plenty of money.
But Clodagh's life seems to be coming unhinged. She can't manage her children (believe me, anyone would have to be a saint to manage them), she's gone off husband Dylan and wants a bit of excitement in her life. She's fed up talking to children all day and fed up with all the 'children talk' to other mothers. When she meets a man, skin and hair eventually fly. The magazine links the three women but there is a lot more to this book than finding out how to launch a magazine. As usual in Keyes work, she deals in an excellent way with problems such as homelessness and depression in an amusing but often hard-hitting way.
Intriguing, fast paced and with that unmistakable Keyes style, Sushi for Beginners is a must-read book.