The Bride Stripped Bare by Anonymous (3.5 stars)

When I started reading this book, Em made some comments like "Are you going to read that on the bus?" and others that I can't remember that made me think I was picking up a Mills and Boon. Thankfully it wasn't nearly as trashy, and although there is a fair bit of sex, not as much as I was expecting given the hysterical things that have been written about this book.

The first thing that struck me, was the second person narrative. Nikki Gemmell (not so anonymous) says:

I was fascinated by that particular tense and wanted to give it a go. It's extremely difficult to sustain...Some people have said, of my unnamed bride, that it was like "reading her brain, being in her head-space," which was exactly the effect I was aiming for-hopefully without too much indulgence.

I actually found it very impersonal, and annoying. This is what it sounds like (stop saying 'you'!):

You'd almost invited her on the spot when she said she was so low. You wanted her to join you just for a couple of days, as a treat: it's her birthday in three days, June the first. But you knew...

Some have speculated that Gemmell's outing as Anonymous was all part of a sneaky marketing ploy. I'm sure the scandal didn't hurt book sales, but I believe her when she says:

I loved the idea of writing a book that dived under the surface of a woman's life, a seemingly contentedly married woman, and explored her secret world-with ruthless honesty...I'd fully intended putting my name to the book when I began it. But six months into the project the text just wasn't singing-I was censoring myself...I'm a wife and a mother of two young boys, not to mention the daughter of two gently bewildered people in their sixties. I didn't want people judging them...But when the idea of anonymity came to me, everything clicked. I was suddenly like a woman on a foreign beach who's confident she doesn't know a soul and parades her body loudly and joyously without worrying what anyone thinks of her.

Much has been made of the sex in this book, but it is way less racy than any edition of Cosmopolitan magazine in the last 15 years. It actually gets quite cosmo-like with a section that lists 'what you want' and 'what you do not want' that could be transplanted straight into cosmo under 'turn ons' and 'turn offs'.

Overall I thought it was a good read.

3.5 stars.