If nothing else A Very Nice Girl has given me an insight on how an opera star makes it. Other than that I found the novel dull. Maybe it speaks more to the female readers than it does to me. Anna in her relationship with Max never really finds the right time or the right words to tell him how she feels. I don't think Max is controlling. Anna seems very needy. I found certain descriptions in the section where they all live in this communal feminist Shangri-La quite distasteful. We all have bodily functions but why do some feminists seem to need to broadcast the workings of the menstrual cycle? Why stop there, perhaps a description of the day's motion would find some literary grittiness, or the colour or smell of one's urine output? Heaven forfend if asparagus was eaten!
No, it wasn't a novel for me.

An unusual, thought-provoking, captivating perspective. Anna's story is written in the first person, but the sentences flow and link and take us inside her head, so that it feels like we are sharing her stream of consciousness. This lent an unusual perspective to the story. I found myself both inside her head, but at the same time judgemental of her thoughts and delusions.

Anna is struggling to afford life in London as she trains to be an opera singer. She has clear talent but she has entered an extremely competitive world where talent might not be enough and only very few succeed, those who really fight for it. She becomes infatuated with an handsome, older, jaded financier, 14 years her senior, and in her desperation to see him, makes questionable sacrifices that could damage her career, her friendships and her self worth.

I found the opera world fascinating and loved how the writer took us into the depths of character analysis within the different operas, taking us step by step through the acting paces. The characters all felt real and believable, from the pretentious feminist flat mates, to Laurie her closest friend, to her parents and of course Anna herself. There was no rosy-halo and the characters were revealed, warts and all The story takes us on a real journey from the rising phoenix, through to the inevitable self-destruction and fall, to the steps of recovery, exploring themes such as toxic relationships, gaslighting and depression. Unforgettable!

Really enjoyed reading this novel. I loved the inner monologue of the main character as well as all the dialogue - it felt very real and genuine. The only downside is that the plot felt a little predictable at times. However, I liked the opera singer storyline and it was interesting to learn more about the challenges of that.

"... only because you think something will change - I said. You wouldn't find it funny if you thought it was forever. You always think, don't you - I do anyway - that something will happen. I don't know what exactly. But something will happen, and you'll have a different life."

Anna is a young woman living in London, following her dream of becoming an acclaimed opera singer and studying hard at the conservatory. Life is difficult - living in rented accommodation with landlords who have hoarder tendencies and bizarre rules about how much water she and her friend Laurie are permitted for baths and struggling to make ends meet. Anna takes a job working as a jazz singer in a hotel bar and one evening meets Max, an older man with good taste in clothes and whiskey, who intrigues her and slowly draws Anna into his world.

A Very Nice Girl has major Jean Rhys vibes and I am here for it! Max makes Anna feel special when he is with her, by taking her to restaurants and bars she could never afford to visit by herself, but leaves her second guessing herself and their relationship when they are apart. The challenges of living in London and trying to shape your own identity and have some kind of control over your life is so well portrayed, I felt really sorry for Anna and the constant battering she experiences.

It was fascinating to learn more about how the super-competitive world of opera singing works and the relentless effort that must be put into training, rehearsals and auditions with so little reward. The characters in the music scenes were all interesting and distinct and I am sure that Crimp must be drawing on people she knows!

I'm still thinking about the ending and whether I felt it was the right one... I guess that when you are in your early twenties it is hard to imagine that you will love anyone or have that kind of intense connection to someone (however terribly they treat you) again, so maybe it was right after all!

The sexual politics of this novel (and lack of punctuation and capital letters!) will appeal to fans of Sally Rooney and the dynamics of the friendship between Anna and Laurie will appeal to fans of Expectation by Anna Hope. A compelling and absorbing debut novel and I will be looking out for more by Imogen Crimp.

I really wanted to enjoy this book, but I’m afraid to say that it just wasn’t for me.

An aspiring opera singer, Anna has moved to London to train at one of the best Conservatoires and fulfil her dreams. The current reality is one of beans on toast and sharing a flat with a few too many people. When she meets Max one evening at the hotel bar where she performs to make some extra cash, she finds herself in a relationship with an older, richer man.

The story is entirely from Anna’s point of view and this leaves the reader wondering if Max’s behaviour is controlling, or whether Anna’s desire to remain independent and succeed on her own terms is leading us to think this way.

Ultimately I wanted the book to be either grittier or lighter - for me it fell somewhere in between and sometimes it just didn’t quite work. The odd swear word from Anna’s best friend jarred against the rest of the language, and the sex scenes either needed to be a bit more chaste or a bit more raunchy! Sadly, I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I’d hoped to.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I was sceptical of this book at first as it felt like another Sally Rooney knock-off (miserable young adults waxing lyrical about politics and making bad decisions on every other page), but for some reason A Very Nice Girl hit differently.

It was a difficult read at times due to the emphasis on topics such as mental illness and emotional abuse, but Imogen Crimp wrote a cast of complex characters who are easy to empathise with - not one of them is 100% "good" or "bad" and this book is better for it. I also really enjoyed how the opera/singing aspects of the book weren't just set-dressing and had real depth.

Crimp's story is a coming-of-age one that deals in a sharp and honest manner with a bunch of heavy topics, such as career, toxic relationships, friendship and feminism.

A Very Nice Girl by Imogen Crimp plunges us into the life of Anna, a young Opera singer, as she balances her love for singing with the devastating fact that it’s hard to make a living out of the life she wants to have. Living in a house with her best friend Laurie, Anna spends her time evading the judgemental stares of her landlords, going to classes she does and doesn’t like, singing at a hotel bar, and just generally trying to exist. This book drew me in from the first chapter.

I struggled through this book and kept expecting it to get better so not a great one for me. The lack of attention to grammar also made it harder to read.

Perhaps it just wasn't my cup of tea? Or perhaps as an audiobook this one would work better?

I struggled to get into it, I think 20 somethings will prob love it!

I do wish this new author all the very best in her future writing, she definitely got a way with words and I love that it was set in London

Thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing, via Netgalley for the review copy.

Thank you to the publishers and Net Galley for my free e-copy.

I want to start by saying how well I think this book is written and how much I enjoyed it.

The story follows Anna an opera singer who is studying and auditioning for parts. We meet other characters connected to her who are her friends, land lady, singing teacher and the guy she is seeing Max.

I felt although in terms of storyline not too much happens, however I really grew to love Anna as a character and I really enjoyed the writing style which was very different to the normal book. We get to hear a lot of flowing thoughts which I liked, Anna could be talking about one subject one moment and then just moves on to another one which I find more real life like and comparable.

Topics covered were love, friendship, dreams and ambitions.

I will def be looking for more books by this author!

A truly enjoyable novel - perfect for fans of Sally Rooney or Naoise Dolan.

There has been a recent rise in the mid-twenties (usually) white woman narrative. As a white woman (debatable) myself, approaching my mid twenties, I enjoy these immensely. The central character is always absolutely miserable, a genuine nutter, with a definite mental illness. Honestly. Same. So -please note upon reading this that I am a very unreliable narrator, BPD, anxiety, and being a queer hermit will certainly do that for you.

This book centres on Anna, a 24 year old aspiring opera singer studying at a conservatory in London. She falls for an older man. Chaos ensues.

So Anna isn't perfect, which I loved about her. She is volatile and seems to exist in her own little sphere. You could say she is selfish. Because she fully is. But she is talented, and an artist, and genuinely loves what she does with such a fervour that it feels like her passion seeps through the pages and into the reader. I wanted to start singing opera after it. (If you have read Holding her Breath I wanted to become a competitive swimmer after that one so maybe this is just very much a me thing).

Her bestie, Laurie, is an absolute legend. She's a dickhead, sure, but she balances Anna's very cool exterior with her very firey personality.

Max (the old finance man love interest) SUCKED, but in these kinds of books that's sort of a given.

As for the plot, it doesn't really have a solid plot, but that's what I love about these sort of books. It's very chill. Just plain sailing.

Gonna order a proper copy as soon as it is released.

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you!)
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

It’s an odd business, coming to a book you know publishing is setting up to succeed. This one was won in something like a four-way auction in my neck of the woods and a five-way stateside, plus pre-emptive translation deals in multiple other countries. The amount of money that must have changed hands over this is slightly unimaginable to me and I find myself asking the sort of questions that no individual text should bear the weight of: such as, what should a multimillion dollarpound book be like?

All of which is slightly ironic because of the central questions of A Very Nice Girl is, what is art worth.

In any case this, is a very good book. I might even go far as to say—and for what little my judgement worth—an exceptional book. Is multimillion dollarpounds of exceptional? Who the fuck knows? But then, Simon and Schuster were willing to fork over $4 million dollars to Mike Pence to talk about himself so who the fuck knows anything?

A Very Nice Girl (a title which seems very much imposed on the book by a team who hasn’t read but is determined to sell it into a certain market) explores a year in the life of Anna: a trainee opera singer who came to London, without the emotional or financial support of her life, to study a prestigious conservatory and, y’know, follow her dream and shit. Anna is an interesting character, being both extremely ambitious and extremely damaged, though she’s also quite elusive. A strange side effect of the first-person narration is that the focus is so claustrophobic, and Anna herself so unreliable, that it’s impossible to actually to see her clearly.

Anyway, while working one of many low-paid singing jobs, Anne meets Max, a forty-year-old city financier. He’s handsome, cold, in the midst of a divorce, she doesn’t even think she likes him very much. But, somehow, she wants his approval. And so they go to dinner, and so they begin a … well. A relationship in all but name. As Anna struggles with the various expenses of living in London, Max lends her money, finds her flat, and gradually Anna finds herself sacrificing more and more of her burgeoning career to the possibility of love, and future, with Max.

So far, so much a story we’ve all read before. And yet. And yet. I don’t have multimillion dollarpounds to back me up but I can’t deny there’s *something* here. Something that makes what could so easily have been a fairly conventional story of a toxic relationship, a bad man and a vulnerable young woman feel unique and intriguing. It’s neither a thriller nor a romance, but it contains the elements I particularly admire in both: a tautly constructed narrative coupled with razor-sharp character work. Above all, I think, a commitment to emotional ambiguity and complex character dynamics that have left me thinking about A Very Nice Girl long after I finished reading it.

It’s also a hard book to talk about because it plays so much with perception, interpretation and uncertainty. Even now, I’m sitting here, trying to assess (without going full victim-blame) the degree to which Max was emotionally abusive. Because, as the book itself points out, while Anna discusses her relationship with her best friend Laurie, there is a narrative here—a simpler, cleaner, more feminist-friendly narrative—where he is, and that’s the end of it. And, oh God, I feel like I’m inviting people to throw well-deserved tomatoes at me if I sit here talking about complicity, but Anna is not a simple protagonist and I feel it does the book a disservice to view her as one. She is a woman who excels at being other people: whether that is her mother’s coddled daughter, Laurie’s hard-up bestie, the characters she transforms herself into on stage. And there is no getting away from the fact that while Max (for all he has issues and vulnerabilities of his own) is, in many ways, a destructive force in Anna’s life, he is only the most categorisable one. We accept the narrative of women re-shaping themselves to please men. But what about other women? Parents. Friends. Colleagues. Teachers. Yes, individual men may simply not notice, or take for granted, the degree to which women change aspects of their lives to accommodate them but what is it about way we raise women, about the social context they inhabit, that creates this expectation with women themselves. And again: please let me emphasise a million times over I am not sitting here swallowing a red pill being like “aaahhhhh but are not *women* the real abusers here.” But for me, part of what’s fascinating about A Very Nice Girl is that allows these questions to exist, and for the reader to find their own answers. As it does its messy, flawed and very human heroine.

Stepping away from really difficult topics, I’ll just add that both the dialogue and the writing are very sharp, darkly amusing when they need to be, but also kind of devastating. I also really loved all the stuff about opera, and training to be a professional singer, and the way gender affects both. Max is an incredibly deft, and not wholly unsympathetic, portrait of a particular type of man (like a large proportion of the people I went to university with have turned into him). Slightly less successful for me was Laurie, occupying the brash best friend role (although, again, she not occupy this role uncomplicatedly) and her circle of loudly feminist friends: while they often had meaningful things to say about gender dynamics, they also often came as quite stereotypical (for example, refusing to use sanitary products, and leaving blood on the furniture, because they don't believe menstruation is something to be ashamed of). The only other thing that irritated me slightly—and this feels entirely subjective—was I wasn’t mad keen on the lack of dialogue markers and absent capitalisation. A Certain Points We Touch, which I read recently, played similarly fast and loose with the conventional rules of punctuation but it felt right for the book, and its rejection of binary and heteronormative spaces. In this case I felt like a bit like that Terry Pratchett quote “he knew it was very symbolic but couldn’t remember what it was symbolic of. Maybe it was just symbolic all by itself.”

In any case, a powerful, complicated, intriguing book. Well worth some of your dollerpounds.

Anna is living in London, training to be a singer at a prestigious conservatoire. She lives in a house with her best friend, Laurie. She’s struggling though, attending rehearsals and auditions. At night she sings jazz at a bar, where she meets Max, a banker who is fourteen years older than her.

I really enjoyed this, much more than I thought I would. At times I found Anna maddening but I was still rooting for her.

There is so much about this book I should have loved : a young woman living In London getting to grips with living in the city whilst trying to become successful at what she loves. A Very Nice Girl covers loneliness, ambition, class, privilege, feminism, struggle and the reality of unbalanced relationships very well. Some of the conversations and situations are perfectly observed. The scene where she is talking to Vincent - a wealthy banker who ‘supports’ the arts - is pitch perfect. However, this one just wasn’t for me. Normally, a lack of speech marks and other punctuation does not bother me at all (I love how Sally Rooney and Bernardine Evaristo have used this) but in this story it did irritate me. This is a really accomplished debut but it was just not for me.

Wow wow wow!! It took me a while to get into but when I did I couldn't stop reading! Ana is such an unreliable but relatable narrator, you feel all her insecurities while at the same time get frustrated over how her relationship with Max develops. The ending was such a relief but despite all the anxiousness the book causes it is worth a read!! Such a strong debut from Crimp.

I loved this book, and saying that makes me feel a little weird. Beautifully written and covering a range of topics and ideas I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

Anna has left a suffocating home life to train as an opera in London. She has been set up to fail by her unsupportive parents. London is an expensive city to survive in, and Anna barely makes ends meet waitressing and singing jazz while her spoilt classmates drown in money. Thank goodness for her one good friend Laurie and her kind and strict mentor, Angela.
Onenight, she meets Max. We are never sure if Max is a good man or tells the truth. He seems to be going through a divorce and doesn't know how to be with Anna very well. Anna begins to rely on Max for her happiness, and life begins toget too much for her. I couldn't help seeing it as a more realistic and serious version of Ballet Shoes. The descriptions of the places Anna and Laurie can afford to live in are bang on. I remember living in London and everyone I knew having money to do glamorous things. The book skewers the loneliness of living in London perfectly.

Read through netgalley

This is the story of Anna who is an opera singing student and her relationships esp with Max- a much older banker. I read this and at times became worried it would become a bit 50 shades but actually the gaslighting and manipulation were much more apparent. I thought the book was very clever in showing how manipulation of fairly intelligent people works. Well written and horribly relatable! Would recommend

A VERY NICE GIRL is an enormously enjoyable read. I see from the blurb that the author is described as a major 'new' talent. That Imogen Crimp is talented is beyond dispute - but the 'new' part surprised me in that this is such an accomplished piece of work. I would have assumed that whoever wrote this had several titles under their belt.

There are so many things to love about A VERY NICE GIRL it feels almost disingenuous trying to point them out when what I really want to say is make sure you get your hands on a copy and see for yourself. You’ll be engulfed and delighted as perfect sentences roll out one after the other, for pages and chapters and sections.

The storyline (young woman comes to make it in London and falls for older man - is he all he seems or not?) feels sparkling and new in Ms Crimp's hands. In part, this is down to the eviscerating honesty, surprising wisdom, and endless wit on display here. The characterisation is breathtaking. I kept trying to work out what was making this tick along beautifully and at one point it occurred to me that a lot of the conflict in play is simply down to the fact that everyone is acting their age. This might sound like a simple point but the nature of ages-stages in life underpins the entire piece and it struck me that Ms Crimp quite simply nails it.

Something else that is exquisitely handled is the setting – a conservatoire of music – where the central character, Anna is studying. Anna is a soprano who spends her days in the world or opera and (some) of her nights crooning out jazz. Not knowing anything about what it feels like to be a singer – let alone an opera singer – I was completely enthralled with Anna’s inner world and her observations on what it takes to fulfil her art.

I fully expect that A VERY NICE GIRL will be on all the best prize lists this year. You just watch.

With thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for letting me see an advance copy of this novel.