Life’s Too Short to Frost a Cupcake – Rosie Wilde

Ever since the death of her mother, when Alice realised that bad things could happen, she’s played it safe. She works at Carmichael Music, where her boss Graham is friendly and approachable, and she lives in an adequate apartment with her adequate boyfriend, low-powered lawyer Stephen, who she met in an anxiety therapy group. Okay, her family life isn’t perfect – largely thanks to younger sister Teresa who, married with twins, never misses an opportunity to belittle the status of Alice’s life – but all in all Alice’s life is drifting along satisfactorily enough.
When Graham’s replaced by highflying Phoebe Carmichael, daughter of the company’s founder, with a reputation for right sizing, Alice is concerned. But instead of being fired, Alice is sent to the New York head office to persuade Wyatt Brown, a once successful but now reclusive (and alcoholic) recording artist, to record a new album. Only “New York” turns about to be Wyatt’s small town home in Ohio, she breaks up with Stephen before she even leaves London, gets off on totally the wrong foot with her target, and encounters a local bitch who makes Teresa look like an amateur. And that’s just the beginning.
I initially found Alice’s voice grating, for three reasons. The first is the emphasis on brand names, so that a random paragraph near the beginning has:

They are both in head-to-toe Boden… I follow the, squeezing past the red Bugaboo Cameleon… In the kitchen – redone last year in cream Smallbone units…

The second is chunks of geography scattered about:

I turn into Replington Road, walk up past Budgen’s and hasten past Starbuck’s, less I’m tempted to grab a hot chocolate. Then I go into the Tube station to wait for a District Line train to Kensington Hight Street.

The final element was Alice’s propensity for drifting into wish fulfilment daydreams, many of which centre around proposals and career success.
However, all of them decrease as the novel progresses, and as Alice becomes better able to discover who she is away from the familiar surroundings that reinforced the limitations of the person who had been she becomes significantly more interesting. I liked Alice’s evolution, the varied sub-plots, and Wilde’s characterisation, particularly of Theresa. The budding romance, as is so often the case in the genre, culminates in a profession of love from the hero, who heretofore has given only minimal evidence of his interest, but this was a relatively minor quibble.
The title was clearly chosen to attract interest – one of the subplots involves a cupcake competition that Alice participates in, and the frosting component takes considerable time (and description in the text), which doesn’t seem to be a problem for any of the characters. Alice, in particular, seems to have not much better to do. If I come across another Wilde book I’ll probably pick it up, and Life’s Too Short was fine, but I have no burning desire to track down her next (or previous) work. - Alex