Ciska recommended this book on Goodreads a few weeks ago, so I also requested it on Netgalley and, even though this was my first request and I had no idea what I had to do, in the end I managed to send it to my kindle and, yes, read it!
The life list begins with a funeral: Brett’s mother, Elizabeth, has died after fighting against cancer and everything is being too hard for Brett because they were very close. But hard times have only just begun because in her will, Elizabeth has made Brett redundant in the successful cosmetics company she was running, as well as denying Brett an inheritance until she manages to achieve several goals Brett had written down on a list when she was a teenager, long time ago.
So when the attorney starts reading the new goals of her life, Brett just thinks that her mother went crazy during the illness: fall in love, when she has been living with her boyfriend for years now; become a teacher, when she has never had the skills to control a class; build a relationship with her father, when her father passed away several years ago; buy a horse? And so on. Brett wrote the list, OK, but that was when she was young and had young dreams.
On the other hand, she needs to do something since her own mother has also ruined her way of earning a living, so she begins to work on the list, if only to get the inheritance. And that’s when she realizes that perhaps her mother actually wanted a better life for her; a life she hadn’t realized she needed. So the reader is taken with Brett through an emotional journey of self-discovery while she manages to get the goals. Besides, she won’t be alone: her family, the attorney and the new friends she finds in her way to success will make her feel that everything he is achieving is worth the effort because she really is happy now.
Some of the goals will turn out to be completely different from the idea Brett had previously and we are going to find a lot of surprises during the reading. The whole story is so vivid that it keeps your interest from the first page; I have cried at some moving passages of the story and laughed at others in which you think that those goals are really a bad joke and, as you see, I enjoyed it a lot, so I fully recommend the book.
I have brought up a discussion on Goodreads about something that is addressed in the story, but you don’t need to read the book to give your opinion (and I’m not giving away any key parts of the story), in case you would like to participate.
Links to the book and the author:
Keep calm and read 20 books in English: 16/20 Literary exploration: Chick-lit
From Isi 