Jessica Adams (1) (1964–)

Big Night Out is a collection of short stories, recipes, song lists, illustrations and edited by Jessica Adams, Maggie Alderson, Nick Earls and Imogen Edwards-Jones. It was published to benefit the War Child charity.

Big Night Out isn't your typical short story collection. There really is a lot here that isn't a short story at all, although the biggest part are short stories. I grabbed it for those (well, I grabbed it mostly for Jasper Fforde's short story in it), so I mostly skimmed through the other things, even though some very big names contributed various things (INXS, Steve Coogan, and Nick Hornby recommending songs? Anthony Stewart Head sharing a cocktail recipe? Joan Collins' beauty tips? Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver, and Boy George detailing hangover cures? It's all there). I did feel that the selection was made on the basis of the people in any case and not necessarily for the quality of their content. But hey, it is for charity after all. If you don't buy it for the stories, but for the good deed, you'll get what you expect.

Read more about the short stories in the collection on my blog: http://kalafudra.com/2018/02/26/big-night-out-ed-by-jessica-adams-maggie-alderso...… (mehr)

For the first hundred or so pages, I was enjoying Jessica Adams' novel, a mash-up of lad lit and a ghost story. Then I don't know what happened, but the narrative changed genders - and genre - to become the worst kind of chick lit, with all the cliches (and racial/religious/sexual orientation stereotypes) thrown in for good measure. After that, I kept falling asleep after plodding through a couple of chapters.

Mark Buckle is your typical English bloke, or as he describes himself, 'thirtysomething teacher, bald, unlikely to be promoted any time soon, miserable bastard on winter mornings, pathetic desire to play and replay songs from his lost youth, cynic, smoker, inveterate bad-tv watcher, sexual deviant' (he's joking about that last part). And I liked him like that. Mark has recently lost his girlfriend, Catherine, in a car accident, and is going through all the phases of bereavement, until Catherine materialises in her pink dressing gown from Next, and starts pestering a clairvoyant to pass on messages. At this point, I was totally in my element - and I have to give bonus points to Jessica Adams for referencing Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), one of my favourite shows. Mark talks to the clairvoyant on the phone, who tells him that he has to let Catherine go, because his energy is keeping her spirit earthbound.

Then Catherine fades away, and Mark develops the Lynx effect - ex-girlfriends, Christian virgins, and even Catherine's sister are all distracting him from his supposed grief for his recently dead girlfriend. His flamboyantly gay colleague, and another, equally larger than life acquaintance at work, keep encouraging him to move on, preferably with stunning but pretentious supply teacher Tess. I could already detect the rosey scent of a happy ever after in the offing, but then when the author started signposting the path to true love with 9/11 and the emotional rescue of a juvenile delinquent via football, I was on the verge of a sickly-sweet sugar overdose. And all that blather about believing in something, from self-esteem to organised religion, was a little heavy-handed. Also, on a purely pedantic level, the phrase is 'I couldn't care less' - if you could care less, as Jessica Adams kept writing, then you do still care!

So - a good idea, padded out with chick lit cliches and cloying life philosophies, that was amusing in parts but mostly unbelievable. That, and I had the lyrics to 'Never Tear Us Apart' and 'I'm A Believer' stuck in my head the whole time I was reading the book!… (mehr)