There is too much going on in this book. It's like two confused stories in one with the first half of the book significantly better and more interesting than the second. I really enjoyed the first half, when main character Stella Sweeney suddenly develops Guillain-Barre and ends up in hospital trapped in her own body and unable to move. It's fascinating and a little terrifying and you really feel for Stella and her stoic attitude and determination.

Then she gets better and it's all downhill from there. It's hard to reconcile the two sections as being part of the same book. Stella becomes a much weaker character. I suppose this might be a suggestion that after 'life-changing' situations where we swear we will never take anything for granted again our lives in fact tend to go back to normal very quickly, like a stretched elastic band snapping back into it's original form. However, this does make the second half of the book feel like a massive let down. It goes from one woman's struggle with paralysis, to one woman's struggle to become a bestselling self-help writer and keep her man. The two don't gel.

Added to that is this weird structure. It starts with a flashback and then alternates between the present and Stella's time in hospital headed by quotes from her book (incidentally, this in itself confused me, as for most of the novel I thought the sections headed by quotes were from Stella's book. But they're not, it's just the quotes themselves, which btw, explains why her book didn't sell because I wouldn't buy a book that just consisted of 60 odd 'motivational' quotes.) Then once she leaves the hospital you suddenly get these random divisions in the book labelled 'HIM', 'HER' and 'ME'. These relate to nothing as far as I can tell. I thought we were suddenly going to get a new point of view character but we don't.

The chronology seems very contrived. I think I would have preferred reading a more linear version of this novel. To keep the 'suspense', several times in the present sections she cuts people off before they can say the name of the boyfriend she's just split up from, as though who that is might be a surprise when it's pretty obvious from the first page who her love interest is going to be. This structure also gives the book the problem of the action catching up to events that have already happened so it ends up repeating itself. It just seems a bit jarring and unnecessary.

There's also the theme of karma running throughout the book that sort of trails off towards the end. Now, possibly this represents the author's suggestion that karma doesn't really exist, but maybe it would have been better if the whole karma thing was left out altogether.

Now I know what you're thinking, if I hated the book so much why give it three stars? Well, I didn't hate it really. It was still very readable and I loved the bits in the hospital. Mostly I'm just disappointed as Marian Keyes is one of the few chick-lit novelists I can stand and it's just not up to her usual standard. It's a jumble of ideas; some intriguing, some disappointing. Not badly written, just patchy and oddly structured.