Angels

Product Information

The earlier two Walsh sister novels didn't really have stand-out plots, but to be fair, they didn't need stand-out plots.

The thing about Marian Keyes books is that you get so involved that you wake up wanting to read another chapter as if it is a part of YOUR day that is unfolding! Maggie has been married for many years and learns through chocolates that her husband is cheating on her.The book was supposed to tell a love story, but it's more of a side story, even if there are always flashbacks. Seré breve, porque los halagos hacia Marian siempre son los mismos, y las quejas, más bien escasas: me ha envuelto al principio y luego me ha ido desinflando, pero hasta que no me ha convencido del todo, no me ha dejado rendirme con él.

Nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens for FAR too long, mostly because the main character doesn't want anything, so she's not trying to do anything, so you get endless descriptions of her pointless days of hanging out.She thinks it will be good to get away for awhile, although she has some ulterior motivation involving an old boyfriend who frequents the Hollywood scene.

The characters from LA were just a little stereotypical and in many ways predictable, and I didn't really care for any of them. Matters get even more complicated when Shay Delaney, the supposed "one that got away," reappears in her life. In the last 30 pages or so, Maggie and her husband simply decide that they want to give it another go and try to fix their marriage. But despite Keyes's talent, the romance structure, with its obligatory happy ending, always triumphs like an addiction, pulling her back into the realm of airport fiction and the mass market. She nails all the LA lingo, from the greetings ("Hey," "Yo," "Go, girl," and "You the man") to the terms of the trade: "good in a room" (skilled at pitching a screenplay to studio execs), "mattresses" (model-actor-waitresses), "pay theatre" (with actors paying for parts as a showcase for their talent), "so great!Podría intentar dármelas de crítica alegando que en esta novela tampoco renuncia a su fórmula, que no se diferencia en nada del resto de su obra y que una vez más lidiamos con el mismo corte de protagonista, el mismo prototipo de secundarios chiflados y el mismo drama existencial… pero si su fórmula es la de mi felicidad, ¿qué es lo que voy a objetar? Maggie had a crisis of confidence, she ran around trying to fix her bad nails, her bad hair, she felt she wasn't good enough. But instead of making our marriage stronger - as always seemed to happen to the other luckier setback souls who popped up in my mother's women's magazines - our particular brand of setbacks did exactly what it said on the tin. You could cut away almost every scene between page 80 and page 400 and you'd still be able to understand the final 80 pages. She's the third of Marian Keyes's most famous literary characters, the Walsh sisters, to be the protagonist of her own novel.

Angels is a book that will make you laugh, cry, and, most of all, hope against hope for a good outcome for the fabulous Maggie Walsh. Maggie has a rather sad back-story, which emerges in the latter part of the novel, and which adds poignancy to her situation with the failure of her marriage. They end up making love, and right afterwards both of them realize that they're not suited for each other, Maggie realizing she's straight after all just like she thought before meeting Laura, and Laura deciding that Maggie was just a rebound thing and not really Laura's type. And no matter what they confess or what they do - addiction, abortion, infidelity - her women are survivors.Is her sojourn in the City of Angels a once-in-a-lifetime journey of self-discovery, or is she simply hiding from the one thing she cannot face?