I so enjoyed her first novel, Marsha Mellow and Me about a mousey secretary writing a porn novel in secret, that I approached this with trepidation, fearing it would not be as good as her first and actually found it better! It has a wonderful Anglo-Greek heroine who aspires to run a fashionable central London fitness ‘emporium’ while coping with her love/sex life, her crazy Greek family and their traditional ideas and a wacky bunch of work mates. The style is fresh, pacy, addictive and humorous. It’s raunchy, bitchy, warm, enormous fun and a bit different. In a word, it’s fab.
Jimmy has big dreams for his daughter Charlie. Well, one big dream: a huge wedding to a rich and handsome Greek. Actually, scrub that. Any Greek will do. Charlie would rather drown in a maggot-infested swamp, but what's new? She's never fitted in with things at home. Work, though, is a different story.
Charlie's been promoted. She's now the funky studio manager at The Zone, an exclusive Total Body Emporium (that's a gym to you and me) where pop stars and plebs alike walk in to work out. Things are looking good and with the arrival of Karl, a multi-talented dancer, her love life's on the up too. However, with The Zone about to become the focus of a Channel Four reality show, the pressure is on. Charlie realises she has to raise her game, but she doesn't know the half of it. She may indeed be getting shagged senseless, but she's also about to get screwed something rotten. MissFit is a hilarious tale of keeping fit, fitting in, and one massively devious fit-up. Oh, and a fat Greek dad.
Maria Beaumont was born into a working-class Cockney-Greek immigrant family. She now lives, respectably, in a North London suburb, not unlike the one in MOTHERLAND.
