I saw this book in Waterstone’s and noticing ‘The Tales of the City’ tag line bought it. I am a huge ‘Tales of the City’ fan. To be fair this book has very little if anything at all to do with ‘Tales of the City’ except for the fact that Emma and her best chum Dee spent their first few penniless months in the fair city of San Francisco.
It is a hilarious remembrance of Emma’s time in the States. You meet Emma as she graduates from Oxford (well you meet her briefly as she starts but the story soon moves to the end) and she and her friend Dee think it a splendid idea to go to America for 4 months with just £350 each. They figure they will soon get a job there as the yanks love the English accent and teeth. As you can imagine things don’t go quite as planned but it’s great fun to join them on the journey. It’s a bit like Enid Blyton meets Jack Kerouac if that makes sense at all…
It’s very funny and I laughed out loud many times, which does not happen all that often.
Emma proves that contrary to what we see on the news each day folks can actually be nice to each other even if they don’t know you. It reminded me of my reckless youth of working in various hotels and travelling all over meeting new people. I really must get my memories of those times finished and only hope it is half as funny as Emma’s.
Coincidentally Emma can be seen on our TV screens at the moment on Masterchef – good luck Emma.
