I’ve been screaming for a while for a good chick-lit book with strong, independent female characters and when I finally find one, I get bored halfway through. The book was good, but I had a hard time holding my interest in it. It follows the lives of three completely different, yet connected women.

Lisa is a flashy magazine editor from London. Her work is everything. She’s been hoping to get a glamorous job at a magazine in New York City, but instead she’s been assigned to setup a brand new woman’s magazine in Dublin, Ireland. She goes from a staff of hundreds to a staff of less than ten. On top of all that, she’s dealing with the breakup of her marriage and realizing she isn’t quite such an awful person after all.

Ashling is older than Lisa and has worked for the same small magazine in Dublin for the past eight years until she invents a cleaning tip that ruins a reader’s couch and is subsequently fired. She lands a job as the assistant editor of Lisa’s new magazine. Not much else is going on with her life. She’s 31 and on the dating scene, not a terribly good mix.

Clodagh is Ashling’s best friend. As far as Ashling is concerned, she has the perfect life. She’s been married to Dylan (an ex-boyfriend of Ashling’s) for the past ten years and has two bratty kids. She has a wonderful house and never has to work. Clodagh is not even remotely happy with her life though. There’s never a hint that she actually loves her children or her husband. She is a spoiled brat, plain and simple.

In the end, everything works its way out. I could have done without Clodagh altogether and some of Ashling’s friends (Ted and Joy) seemed to be written into the story only to be used in a small way later on. They have no real purpose in being there at all.

I thought it was a good book overall. It was a bit slow. Wouldn’t have hurt the author to shave about 150 pages off the book. Sushi wasn’t even mentioned until page 290 and then for the remaining 136 pages it’s like the only thing people could think about was sushi. It almost seems as though at that point in writing the book the author thought of the clever title “Sushi for Beginners” and decided to incorporate as much sushi and explanation of “beginner’s sushi” as she possibly could throughout the remainder of the novel.