Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees bought something a little different to the chick-lit genre in 1998 with their debut collaboration “Come Again”. Whilst the standard chick-lit subjects of love, sex and breaking up were included, what made “Come Again” different was the writing for each main character was done by the author of the same gender. This avoided the age old genre problem of each gender’s perceptions of the other, which have frequently had characters acting in inappropriate ways, depending on the gender of the writer.
The authors have used the same technique here, but the scope of the story is widened. Rather than focussing on Amy and Jack this time around, although the backdrop of the story is their impending wedding and stag and hen nights, the story instead focusses on their friends. Matt, Jack’s former flatmate and now best man and H, Amy’s friend and maid of honour, were integral if not main characters in the previous book, but now step up. Stringer, a new character but an old friend of Jack’s, is working for the company who is catering the wedding and Suzie is another old friend of Amy’s who comes no closer to catering than her reputation as a man-eater.
This makes things a little more complicated than the relatively straightforward romance between Jack and Amy before. Especially as Matt and H have recently slept together and, whilst Matt is keen for it to go further, H has other plans, so Matt resorts to booking the stag weekend at the same venue H has chosen for the hen weekend in the hope they bump into each other. Suzie and Stringer, on the other hand, haven’t slept together, although Suzie would rather like to, which is a bit inconvenient as she’s decided she wants a relationship rather than a one-night stand. Stringer’s reputation is not dissimilar to Suzie’s, although whilst it is well earned and well deserved in Suzie’s case, the truth behind the rumours in Stringer’s past is a lot less interesting.
As before, the story is told from the perspective of these main characters, switching after each chapter and with chapter headings telling you who is telling the story at any given point. Unlike before, the chapters are of varying lengths, making it easier for each side of the story to give their view of a particular event at more or less than same time as the others, without having to wait a few pages for the perspective to change as happened in the earlier book. This offers the advantage of giving a more balanced perspective, as you get the competing view more closely together. However, it does make reading the book as a novel a little more of a patchy experience, as you often got bits where the same ground was being trodden on repeatedly before moving on, which sometimes felt as it the pace of the story had slowed as things weren’t moving forwards at that point.
This also meant that the issue that often afflicts chick-lit novels happened here as well, in that there is far too much going on. Each of the characters has multiple roles in this story, having multiple romantic entanglements, issues with their working lives and a role within the wedding parties. This expands the cast of characters to the point at which is it occasionally difficult to keep track of who is related to which character and which part of their lives at any given time, especially as their working lives are touched upon much less frequently than their personal lives and serve only to add unnecessary additional drama and complications that the story should have had enough legs to avoid under normal circumstances.
As with the original book in the series, a couple of aspects disappointed me. The sheer amount of action and coincidences made the book seem less realistic, as did Suzie’s financial situation, which was apparently precarious, but somehow money was available when required, which is a common genre failing for these types of novels. The ending was, once again, a huge disappointment as it was all too neatly wrapped up to have anything more than a nodding acquaintance with reality and some of the conversations that resulted in this ending were far too polite and personal to be anything other than plot devices.
“Come Again” is a bigger book than “Come Together”, but it certainly isn’t better, as whilst it retains the interesting narrative style, it falls for more genre clichés than its predecessor. That said, if you’ve enjoyed the former, you can hardly avoid the latter and it’s not going to disappoint you too much if that’s the case, even if it is a weaker companion.