Read Any Good Books Lately?

Well, as a matter of fact I have. Whilst trying to reconcile my love of the web with my previous career in book publishing I’m often faced with the dilemma of no time for reading for enjoyment. I adore words, their subtleties and their use fascinates me and that fact that a well worded insult can wound more profoundly than a bunch of fives really does it for me. With that in mind I got up from my desk on Saturday and went to the biggest book store I could find and spent hours trawling through the shelves trying to find something good to read.

I stumbled across a very pink looking book ‘Sugarbabe’ by Holly Hill (a pseudonym I learn from the back cover) that’s based on a true story and immediately I’m enthralled. Let me tell you this is not highbrow literature but it is one of the most compelling things I’ve read in a while. So much so that the next time I looked up it was 20 minutes later and I’d read 25 pages. Thought I’d better purchase it before someone came up and said “it’s not a library y’know.”

This is what it’s about – after a failed relationship 35 year old Psychologist, Holly decides that to pay her mortgage and write the novel she’s been conceptualising she needs a Sugar Daddy. She places an ad and the rest of the book is her search for and encounters with wealthy men (one at a time of course) who employ her services as confidant and lover. Now, if this book were just sex and titillation then I’d probably have given up around page 40 (my usual give up point for annoying fiction where I don’t care about the characters) but ‘Sugarbabe’ is so much more and charms you with it’s portrayal of ‘real’ characters with real human flaws. It also challenges your notion of right and wrong and begs the question ‘how far would you go?’

On the scale of ‘buy a copy of Marie Claire instead and save yourself the pain’ to ‘no, no I’m serious…you have to read this book’ Sugababe comes in with just less than top marks and I’m giving it a ‘go on…treat yourself.’

Sugarbabe by Holly Hill $32.95

Published by Random House Australia