Bad Heir Day

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

One shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but the title of this superficial second novel by Holden (Simply Divine) suggests all one needs to know about what lies within. Awkward puns, shallow characters and predictable plot lines do little to prolong, much less provoke, interest. Struggling writer Anna Farrier knows that her handsome London live-in boyfriend, Sebastian Lavenham, is a womanizer, but his promiscuity becomes inescapably obvious when she realizes he has slept with most of the female guests at a wedding reception at Dampie Castle on the Island of Skul off Scotland. Anna makes a friend herself at the wedding, though, and gutsy Geri gives Anna some much-needed career advice. Thinking she is to be a writer's assistant to bestselling romance novelist Cassandra Knight, Anna leaves Sebastian and moves into the Knights' exclusive Kensington home. In actuality, the job requires playing nanny to alternately spoiled and neglected eight-year-old Zachary, whom Cassandra believes can do no wrong. When she isn't deluding herself about her supposedly gifted son or drinking excessively to drown the pain of writer's block, Cassandra engages in screaming matches with her aging rock star husband, Jett St. Edmunds. He is in the habit of shagging the nannies and practicing with his band Solstice, which he insists will prove popular again. Anna must humor Cassandra, control Zachary and avoid Jett if she is to survive this especially dysfunctional household and escape with one of the Scottish suitors she finally attracts. Flat rather than frothy, this soap opera-ish confection never quite takes off, and what should have been a guilty pleasure devolves into forgettable farce. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Girl-meets-earl fantasy from a very funny British novelist. Anna Farrier is 22 and an Oxbridge graduate who longs to be a writer, though she's been rejected by publisher after publisher. And now Sebastian, the handsome, womanizing heir to a sewage-company fortune who let her move into his posh London flat, has rejected her too. At a weekend wedding in Scotland he even beds a beautiful guest, but Anna gets too drunk to care. She's busy flirting with Jamie Angus (a laird she mistakes for a waiter) and giggling with Geri, a gorgeous consultant who advises Anna to become a writer's assistant. Back in London, Anna puts up a situation-wanted notice, and Cassandra Knight, a best-selling romance novelist suffering from writer's block, answers it. Anna soon figures out that Cassandra, a witchy alcoholic who's clawing her way up the social ladder, is really looking for a nanny for her young son Zak. Still temporarily homeless, Anna takes the job, though she hates it. Besides the unspeakably naughty Zak, there's Cassandra's repellent husband, an over-the-hill rock star named Jett, who stomps around wearing only a leopard-print thong while he plots his comeback. A few weeks of comical martyrdom among England's new social elite pay off when Anna runs into Jamie Angus again at an upscale kiddy party and discovers at last that he's a real, live laird—and apparently madly in love with her. The two run off to his moldering ancestral castle, aptly named Dampie and staffed with bizarre family servants. But Anna is miserable—until she meets local poet Robert MacAskill, tall, rugged, sexy, intelligent, and attractively modest—as befits the son of an earl.Thewhimsical ingenuity ofP.G. Wodehouse meets the sex-o-matic action of Jackie Collins. Holden (Simply Divine, 1999) stays in control of her supercharged farce all the way, though, even when a host of hysterically funny secondary characters almost steal the show.