Everybody’s Doing It by Abigail Collins
3 stars
Everybody’s Doing It is a romantic comedy with a strong internet dating theme. Written by comedy performer Abigail Collins, this story features divorcée Kat, her friends, family and her dating disasters.
The book is set in London and is heavily laced with British comedy; comedy can be a very individual thing and although I can see what the author was trying to achieve, it didn’t have me chuckling along as much as I had hoped it would. The internet dating theme has had a lot of success in contemporary fiction, but I thought that this book missed adding anything new to the genre; it felt like lots of stand-up comedy material brought together between the covers of a book, rather than a story that I wanted to be invested in which also made me laugh.
So overall, the author’s strong comedy material shone through, but it didn’t work for me as an interesting novel.
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Three years after the sudden and deeply traumatic end of her marriage Katherine Wheeler remains terminally single. On the eve of her 39th birthday she sets herself a challenge: within a year she will be pregnant and married. What could possibly go wrong? Cue a series of hilariously awful internet dates, from the handsome doctor with terrible breath, to a prematurely bald pop star, and the extremely well-endowed ‘Anaconda Man’.
Hapless actress Kat is supported in her quest by a superb cast of friends and family; gorgeous best pal Jojo, successful, same sex couple Bil and Ben, perennial alcoholic bachelor, Gropey Dave, her oversexed mother, her long-suffering father, her belligerent younger brother and glamorous yummy mummy cousin.
Nothing quite goes as expected or hoped for as a shocking family secret, a brush with mortality, and the ever present spectre of working in the gig economy, threaten to turn Kat’s dream into a living nightmare.
A frank, funny, feel-good first novel about what it means to be a single woman trying to find a mate in the modern world.
Rosie Amber 