i just finished reading a (god help me) Jilly Cooper book...it was utter crapola

[purplemonkeydishwasher]

and yet i continued to read it. page after page. chapter after agonizing chapter. I read it all. the whole time thinking: "where the hell is this stupid meandering story going?" and in the end i wasn't disappointed....it ended as poorly as it began. (it was called Wicked! BTW. her exclamation point, not mine)

took me forever too, and I'm a fast reader. that's a week i'll never get back.

I loved the horsey ones... Riders and Polo. Read them all as holiday beach books.

Wicked was truely dreadful though. It is the only one I gave up on.

Perhaps someone could tell me how it ended, just so's I'm not tempted to go try it again.

Wicked was the worst book I've ever read. How the hell it got published beats me.

Riders, Rivals, and Harriet etc are fab - the only bearable one recently was Pandora. I keep on reading them, ludicrous optimism, but I think she lost the muse when her husband cheated on her while she was writing the ubercrapola Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, and it's never returned.

Wicked is awful - stick to the horsey ones expat! I love the way Jilly calls a dishwasher a washing up machine, and sometimes explains her jokes.

Well...here goes...

I know it was crap, and some of it made me really, really cringe, but...

...I enjoyed it

Yes - and it's not a hugely stiumulating read - it is like cotton wool for the brain. If you know it's gonna be naff then it can be quite fun..... (and boy .... is it naff) Just don't expect a literary masterpiece!

Cotton wool's good for me at this time of year. Ideal mindless beach read.

fruittea - to each their own of course. Have you read Jilly's earlier books?

Yes MT

And I think you might have a point Turq, I think Man who made husbands jealous was her first bum note and it kind of went a bit wrong from thereon in, with the poss exception of Pandora, which wasn't too bad.

ooh i have it on to read pile. from library so no investment. poor jilly, emily and prudence so good.

Last one I read was one of the later Riders ones.. the one about the artist family.. that was good.

How is the style different then?

Artist family was Pandora

Ah yes, that's right.

Rupert Campbell Black getting ever more old and lecherous, but still liked reading about him in the background of these later novels. Think I fell for him in Riders.. and even the televised version with the actor that looked the part but couldn't act and made a mockery of all JC's one liners didn't change my feelings for him

Has JC really gone to pot??!

It's not so much the style as the content. Teachers shagging pupils. Every 13-year-old is sexually active. Paedophiles and quite astonishing ignorance (she has the Muslim mum get pissed at a party and the Muslim dad have a flutter on the gee-gees). This is not Jilly territory, it should all be poshos having orgies and carefully-observed satire of the middle classes. And horses.

YES tribpot, she was out of her comfort zone and writing about stuff she knows NOTHING about, absolutely, with Wicked. The paedophilia stuff was really vile.

I didn't see the tv version, thank god, Rupert CB HAS to stay the way I see him in my head.

Totally agree with your post

It sounds vile!

I did see the TV version and it was utter pants. Fortunately I have since cast it out of my mind, as it was totally unworthy of having anything to do with La Jilly.

It was really quite shocking, yes. I'm surprised no one stopped her

Apart from the fact that it's so distasteful and badly researched, it's also just plain idiotic - all that nonsense about the Sunday Times etc covering school rugby matches. Plus the fact that she has so ridiculously many characters now, it's impossible to remember who the hell everyone is.

Just utter rubbish, not even in an enjoyably so bad it's good way.

I despised the head teacher for sleeping with Hengist too.

Having read 'Bestseller' by Olivia Goldsmith, I definitely see comparisons between Jilly and the author in that (Susan Baker Edmonds) that they've bought in for the power of her backlist of titles, but her current stuff is just utter tripe. Despite their best efforts, they can't turn the latest one into anything half-decent but have to publish in the hopes of her die-hard fans (i.e. me) buying the latest one regardless of content.

So is it a totally new set of characters? No more "Rutshire" or wherever it was?

Me too, I bought Wicked in hardback, not knowing it would be dreadful. I know lots of clever and literary peolpe who love JC, we're not alone!