TOTALLY FABULOUS

Author: Michelle Radford ISBN: 9780061285318 6/2010 YOUNG ADULT Publisher: HARPER TEEN

If you had the power of mind control, could you resist using it? (Didn't think so. Fiona Blount feels your pain.) Fiona is coming to America! Her long-lost-now-found father is bringing her from London to meet his family. Of course, there's a secret agenda for her trip: Fiona has inherited her dad's psychic abilities and is off to ESP boot camp. Good thing she doesn't take after the rest of his family—a pretty moody bunch. Fiona knows she shouldn't be using her power of compulsion until she has more training, but if she can make people happier, isn't it almost her duty to do so? She's sure that with just a little bit of nudging, they'll all be on their way to being totally fabulous—but is she totally deluded?

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

TOTALLY FABULOUS is Michelle Radford’s sequel to ALMOST FABULOUS, and the book definitely reads like a sequel. For much of the first quarter of the book I was confused as to what was going on; I didn’t know who the characters were, or how they were related, and I felt as though I was missing a huge chunk of backstory. While Fiona’s antics were humorous at times, for the most part I found her to be unrelatable. Perhaps this stems from the fact that Fiona is a Londoner through and through, and as an American reader I didn’t have the same frame of reference for a lot of things. Or, perhaps, Fiona is just not that likeable.

My other complaint about TOTALLY FABULOUS is that for the first 100 pages of the book, nothing really happens. It seems like Michelle Radford uses a lot of words to describe a lot of inaction because there’s a lot of set up for action, without any of said action. Once you get over the hump of the first 100 pages, the story moves along quite quickly. And if you can stand Fiona as a lead character, you will probably enjoy the story. Fiona does have her funny moments; I just felt that they were far and few between.

Overall, TOTALLY FABULOUS was decidedly less than totally fabulous—it wasn’t a completely horrible read, but I don’t plan on rereading it any time soon, either.

Jilian Vallade