I’m not sure what to make of chicklit really. In my mind the term has come to mean something fairly derogatory, something lightweight and implied within it is a somewhat slightly snobby attitude.

I’ve read plenty of literary heavy weights in my time as well as more frothy writers. Sometimes after wading through a particularly heavy tome, I like to pick up something that I can skip through, something that won’t tax me too much but that will hold my interest for me to reach the end of the book.

I’m left feeling a bit dissatisfied with ‘Life Swop’ I must say. I’ve read a couple of other novels by Green, but admittedly not for a long time. This, I found to be a completely boring cliché. It wasn’t so much the characters, although they were fairly dull, it was their situations. The singleton who wanted to be married with kids, who had a brother who lived in Somerset with the lifestyle that she wanted (so why didn’t she swop lives with him then?) The all American mom who was obsessed with designer labels, designer bathroom accessories, and impressing her vacuous friends and hey, guess what? Yes, they swop lives and discover they both kind of like what they had all along. How very predictable.

What really annoyed me about Life Swop though was the constant naming of products, it was like one big advert and I did wonder at one point if Green were being sponsored by Gap, Oscar de la Renta or Balenciaga.

I would heartily recommend that the reader do a book swop and give this particular novel a very wide berth.