BOOK REVIEW: A Reluctant Cinderella by Alison Bond

I loved Alison Bond's The Truth About Ruby Valentine so I've been looking forward to A Reluctant Cinderella for a while. And I loved it as much as I expected to. I actually finished it in the middle of the night (I woke up at 2.30am, started reading and didn't lie back down until 5am). I can't remember the last time I did that.

It's the story of successful football agent ("superagent" in fact), Samantha Sharp. As the book begins, she's doing the biggest deal of her career. One of the biggest in football history and one that's going to see her banking a £1million bonus. Her working life is incredibly successful and her personal life is relatively satisfying too. She's sleeping with - and in love with, not that she'll admit it - her boss. The one blot is that her beloved brother - her only family - is in prison. Oh and no one else in her life knows about him. But then aspersions are cast on Samantha's integrity and she finds herself losing everything. 

I'm struggling to write this review without addressing the elephant in the room and that, as other reviewers have pointed out, is the cover. I'm not a fan of illustrated covers at all and I do think this one is particularly wet (in fact, the heart-shaped traffic lights almost tip it over into offensively infantilising), but now that I've read the book I find myself actually quite angry about it. The book is about a strong woman who is incredibly successful in a male-dominated world. A lot of the book is about football (Bond writes really well about football - I'm planning to interview her and ask her all about that aspect of it). It's set in Eastern Europe and features a shady Russian businessmen. Do you see that on the cover? Not so much, no. The back cover blurb is not much better. It bears just as little relation to the book and actually contains a couple of things that are just plainly untrue. 

But that's enough ranting - back to the book. I loved it. It was gripping and totally convincing. I loved Sam Sharp, her assistant Leanne and their boss Jackson. I loved the football descriptions (so rare to read good football writing in a novel) and the descriptions of Krakow. I found it all completely convincing. Can't wait to see what Bond comes up with next. I just hope her next book has a more appropriate cover.

Comments

[Chloe]

SO glad you agreed about the cover and blurb, both are rubbish yet the book is brilliant. They shouldn't be allowed to be that misleading!!

[Debs]

mmm... football, just what we need right now!

[alison]

Thanks for the lovely review Keris. That's the first time anyone has said they stayed up until dawn reading me, which is hugely flattering!

Debs, when I was writing it I liked to imagine a football widow curled up reading it while her other half was glued to the yawnfest that is the World Cup. It's not about football, it's about footballers. The cute ones.

[Keris]

You're welcome, Alison. I told Harry I was tired because he'd woken me up at 2.30 and then I'd been reading until 5. He said, "Well. You should've gone to bed earlier." Pfft.