The Go-To Girl [Paperback]

Louise Bagshawe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 2005

Gorgeous goddesses seem to surround lowly script-reader Anna Brown--from her deranged, glamour-queen boss to her perfect, pouting roommates. For Anna, being less-than-beautiful is hard to bear. With a dead-end job and a dead-beat boyfriend, she wonders if she can ever be a success. In beauty-crazed London, perhaps being talented just isn't enough. Enter Mark Swan, Britain's hottest director. Rugged, reclusive and powerful, everybody wants a piece of him--from studio heads to supermodels. He could be Anna's ticket to the top, but how can she ever hope to snag such a big star? Fed up with being dowdy and downbeat, Anna decides to chase her dreams, and with a little help from her friends, embarks on a madcap scheme to get what she's after.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Anna Brown, the 32-year-old London native who narrates Bagshawe's contrived latest chick-lit offering (after The Devil You Know), is ugly. She describes her unfortunate traits (large nose, masculine build and extra weight) soon after the story begins and never lets the reader forget them. The novel plods along as self-loathing Anna is dumped by an acne-ridden boyfriend, argues with her thin, gorgeous roommates (they're models) and achieves some small successes as an underpaid script reader for a film company. Despite Anna's low self-esteem, when she meets powerful film director Mark Swan, she manages to sabotage their budding friendship by tiresomely insisting that Swan help her sell her first attempt at a script, thus scuttling her best chance for romance. To make matters worse, she agrees to marry another man, super-rich—and super-unattractive—Charles. Few of Bagshawe's characters shrink from opportunism, and their eventual redemption may ring a little false after so much gleeful money-grubbing. Some readers will enjoy the bitchiness, but others may think that ugly is as ugly does, and that Anna deserves her big nose—though the inevitable makeover scene is good fun.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Readers jaded by British chick lit will get suckered into adopting this hapless, lovable heroine. Script-reader Anna Brown longs to make it in the film production biz, but she's lousy at sucking up (unlike office-mate John) and sexy flirting (unlike office-mate Sharon). When's she not fetching coffee or taking abuse from her quixotic boss, Anna nurses a serious case of the glums from living with two glamorous models. Anna's big break arrives in the form of England's hottest bad-boy director, Mark Swan, who unearths Anna's potential as a screenwriter when she goofily interrupts his location scouting with her witty badinage. Believing she'll never make it in showbiz or catch Mark's eye, Anna allows herself to be talked into an arranged marriage with the wealthy and arrogant Charles. Traditional mishaps include getting fired, romantic misunderstandings, and hiding figure flaws. Expected resolutions include discovering hidden talent, shucking loser boyfriend, and fabulous makeovers. The same tired chick-lit elements are present but wrapped up in snappy dialogue and entertaining characters. Readers won't care if they can second-guess the plot. Kaite Mediatore
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; First Edition edition (January 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312339917
• ISBN-13: 978-0312339913
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #667,260 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Funny Chick Lit Novel Filled With Interesting Characters, February 5, 2005

By 

Rian Montgomery "Rian Montgomery" (Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Go-To Girl (Paperback)

In this book, Louise Bagshawe has created a novel filled with vibrant characters and a suspenseful romantic plot, which I might add kept me reading far into the night.

Now, if you think YOU have a pathetic life, try out Anna's, our main heroine: She is a self-admitted "ugly" girl, has an underpaid (albeit interesting, at times) job of reading slush movie scripts, complete with a horrible boss and a lazy, catty coworker who just got promoted over her. Anna also lives with two beautiful models (one of which is very stuck up) and who have no qualms in assuring Anna of how ugly she is. If all of that isn't bad enough, she has just been dumped by her boyfriend Brian, who had suffered from halitosis and questionable body odor. The cherry on the pie is Anna's personality. She is horribly acquiescent - to the point of being a complete pushover.

However, her luck is about to change. After her company is taken over by a large corporation, Anna's boss-from-hell Kitty has ordered her to find a movie script that will actually be able to be made into a movie. Anna somehow manages to do that, and manages to find a top-name director to make the movie. This director, the reclusive, handsome and enigmatic Mark Swan, takes an interest in Anna and manages to get her on board with the movie. He also seems rather interested in Anna on a personal level... might it have something to do with her recent makeover?

Too bad Anna is convinced that such a handsome guy isn't interested in her. Instead, she gets caught up with Charles, a man who is rich, but with whom she has absolutely no chemistry whatsoever. When he proposes marriage, Anna's life is thrown into a tailspin. And things only get more insane from there...

Despite Anna's major character flaws, I got so into the story that I ended up finishing it in one night. The narrative is lively and funny, and some romantic suspense is thrown in for good measure. Lastly, the dialogue that occurs between the many characters is often very humorous.

The major downside to this novel was Anna's doormat character, (at least until the part of the book that she finally grows a backbone). People that enjoy assertive characters will absolutely despise Anna in the first half of the book. However, good storytelling makes up for these downfalls.

Overall, I definitely recommend giving this book a read. It is a fun, absorbing and interesting novel that one can immerse oneself in for hours.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Guilty pleasure, May 18, 2005

By 

Bearette24 (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Go-To Girl (Paperback)

The reason this book worked so well for me was the main character, Anna. For some reason, I always like heroines without self-confidence. You root for them, and want them to succeed.

Anna is the "dogsbody" for Kitty, a "wasp-waisted woman of a certain age, with a great plastic surgeon, so no one can tell what that age is". Anna's responsible for finding scripts. When Anna does spot a great one, Kitty takes the credit - but Anna catches the eye of Mark Swan, a (fictitious) big-deal UK director. He insists on working with her instead of the other people at Winning Productions.

Meanwhile, Anna is reluctantly pulled into a romance with Charles, a member of the landed gentry. Anna's friend fixed them up. While Anna is not attracted to him, and he "doesn't fancy her", they do forge a friendship of sorts, and he supports her in her dream of screenwriting. Meanwhile, Mark insists that she rewrite the script she's been working on, and stops pulling strings for her.

The subplot involves Anna's two model flatmates - one a young blonde, the other a 28-year-old brunette who is being forced into catalogue work because of her "old age." The blonde is rather one-note, but the brunette and Anna become friends, and Anna does her an enormous favor in the end.

One note: the plot description on the back of the book promises a "madcap scheme" whereby Anna gets what she wants, but there really was no such scheme - on behalf of herself, anyway. I found Anna to be a genuine, kind, funny character. She made the 372 pages worth reading. And yes, she gets some confidence by the end.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars So much fun, June 9, 2006

By 

Ambergold (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Go-To Girl (Paperback)

Unusually well-written and fabulously fun chick lit. Hilarious and enthralling, I started it right before going to the beach and found myself too absorbed to even swim-I just spent the whole time reading. Bubble-gum fluff, of course, but then isn't that what it's all about? Anna is a character you can empathize so much with, there are plenty of plot turnings and small details to keep you interested, Mark Swann is of course gorgeous and amusing and unusually for this type of fiction, someone you feel like you could actually meet in real life(except for the whole director thing, of course) And I especially appreciated the fact that the romance isn't driven by or founded on lust, with love something following almost as an after-thought. Clean, light, and fun, this laugh-out loud summer fling left me in a glow of well-being. A really unusual chick flick that's a good notch above most others in its genre.