I really like Mel Giedroyc. I find her very funny and extremely engaging, and behind that slightly daffy persona there’s an extremely intelligent mind, so I was hoping for something very good here. I’m afraid I was disappointed.

The Best Things relies on a very well-worn trope: a very wealthy woman finds herself rather bored and without purpose. She has little relationship with her husband or children who are all cocooned in their own comfortable worlds...until they lose everything and have to survive together and begin to learn Valuable Life Lessons.

It’s fine for what it is; Mel writes well, it’s decently structured and readable. The trouble is, it all seemed such old hat – to the point of being trite in places. The characters are well drawn but oh-so-familiar and I really couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for any of it.

The Best Things isn’t actively bad by any means; I may not be the target audience and others may enjoy this more than I did, but I can’t really recommend this. Sorry, Mel.

(My thanks to Headline for an ARC via NetGalley.)

I only got this book today and I’m gobbling it up like you wouldn’t believe. I am so near the end and felt I had to write the review now as it’s one of the best things I’ve read this year. I chose this book on a whim and am so glad I did. Please read it.

In a nutshell, this is the story of a very rich family and how they cope when everything goes tits up.

All of a sudden they have no money, no staff, no friends and nowhere to live. How are they going to cope and survive?

I really didn't enjoy this book at all. The only two characters that I liked were Sally and Mikey. The rest, I couldn't care less about.

The premise of this book was that Sally, an ordinary woman, is married to high flyer Frank who's business suddenly dive-bombs in an economic crash and she surprises everyone with her tenacity. Except she doesn't. She isn't really an 'ordinary' person - she grew up in some decaying stately home, she now lives in a mansion with staff, who she can't manage and who run rings around her. She doesn't relate to her children because she doesn't really talk to them, but she does make 'mental notes' that she should interact with them more.

I expected to like Sally, I wanted to see her triumph over her adversity. Instead I found her as one-dimensional as all the other characters in this book, and really didn't like her at all. Frank is just unbelievably wet; there's just no way any entrepreneur could act the way he did. Both brothers are nightmares, the parents are stereotypes and the only ones that come out with any backbone are the children.

Its all a bit predictable, happy ever after, and very stereotypical. I wanted to enjoy it, I found it quite disappointing. Its a light read for a rainy afternoon, but I found myself actually getting annoyed with how the characters behaved.

Thank you to NetGalley and Headline Review for allowing me access to the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I found the first half of this very slow going. Though generally well written, it seemed interminable. It wasn’t until well into the second half that it got going for me, and I began to wonder how the story would work out. Even at the end, I didn’t feel satisfied. I suspect this may turn into a series.
There were lots of funny turns of phrase that I relished, and most of the characters felt well drawn. There was, for me, just too much description and explanation at the beginning and I lost my enthusiasm.

I was sent a copy of The Best Things by Mel Giedroyc to read and review by NetGalley. In the beginning I wasn’t sure if I would like this novel, with it’s wealthy, conceited, self-aggrandizing cast of players. How wrong I was! The further I got into the book the more I loved the characters and the lively many faceted episodes within each chapter just kept me reading on and on. In fact I whizzed through the whole book in a couple of days. The writing is sharp and witty, though not necessarily laugh out loud funny – I think it’s better than that! I do hope that Mel Giedroyc realizes what a good story writer she is and keeps producing more and more!

I really wanted to love this but I didn't quite. My main issue was that I found pretty much all of the main characters unbearably horrible for most of the book, and to the extent that I personally struggled to find them believable. There was also a huge amount going on and we jumped around narratives and characters a lot, which was sometimes hard to keep track of. I think the final third or so, when people stopped being quite so awful, was the most enjoyable.