GIRL POWER D.I.Y
With its crash, bang, wallop devil may care style this book is the equivalent of taking a big dipper roller coaster ride without the benefit of a speed limit. British based US author Betsy Cook Speer has written a novel with an off the scale level of nuttiness that leaves you wanting more. Escapism is what it’s all about and boy does she deliver!
Sam Albany, the novel’s sassy American heroine, is a fast-talking blonde married to a distant cousin of the British royal family for whom home is a sprawling country mansion. She may have the kind of glossy, high-end lifestyle that warrants a spread in Country Life magazine, but this lady of the manor is no shrinking violet. Sam is on a mission to empower Britain’s women and she does it via her hit DIY TV show Demolition Queen. If you can’t quite get the gist, then imagine Wonder Woman with a box end wrench hanging from her waist and a welding kit on her back! Nothing holds any fear for Sam as she blasts her way through brick walls, rips up rotten floor boards and exterminates dodgy plumbing with the casualness of a Formula 1 driver changing gear.
Unfortunately, Sam’s world goes pear shaped when her brilliant scientist Mom is murdered and the ground-breaking biotechnology product she was working on falls into the wrong hands. Only Sam has the grit to track down the killer while putting the world to rights and she does it with a classic girls’ own adventure. When she’s not driving and shooting her way across Europe, she sword fights villains, blows up a Scandinavian beach hut after being kidnapped, and gets involved in a high-speed car chase that almost leaves her flattened by a double decker bus. Nothing stands in her way – not even a death threat – hence the novel’s extremely low body count.
Demolition Queen has an improbable plot that makes you laugh out loud because it’s a funny, wisecracking read that’s perfect for a lazy afternoon read.
Reviewed by Juliette Foster
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