Freya North Love Rules

Love Rules by Freya North is a very modern piece of chick-lit. It's touching, funny and a bit racy in places, and gives you exactly what you want when you buy a novel in the supermarket because it has a brightly coloured cover - lighthearted entertainment to occupy your brain without taxing it.

This book takes us through several years in the complex lives of two best friends. Alice marries a man on a whim because she believes that love is nothing more than a chemical reaction, and that marriage requires something beyond romantic love. Her new husband is someone she has known for years, and despite caring for him, she misses the passion she had with other ex's and considers the benefits and costs of infidelity.

Thea on the other hand, a firm believer in romantic love, meets a great guy through coincidence and forges a strong passionate relationship with him, which seems the perfect merging of their two lives and their two worlds, until a second coincidence reveals his dirty secret.

This book is great in that it shows the flaws in both types of thinking and some of the challenges in building a truly successful and long-lasting relationship. It also shows the value of friendship and of being able to overlook the flaws in the people you care about.

But on the other hand, I couldn't help feeling that some of the characters, namely Alice, her husband, and Thea's boyfriend Saul, were caricatures rather than three-dimensional people.

While you're probably not going to receive any great philosophical revelations from this book, and it's unlikely to be nominated for the 2006 Booker Prize, it was a fun and enjoyable read, which is really all you can ask for.