Playing Away [Paperback]

Adele Parks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 26, 2001

It's sexy. It's roguish. It's hilarious. It's a sensational debut novel from London, a joyously comic take on modern marriage and its fallout. Single people may feel they have it rough...but wait until you see what happens when married folk fall in lust.

Connie Green's life should be perfect. She has a hot career, her wonderful husband, Luke, and a bunch of great girlfriends. But she has just met overwhelmingly sexy John at a business conference. Her head and her heart said, "no way," but her traitorous body shrieked "yes, YES!" Now Connie's deep into a tawdry affair, which is destroying her peace of mind and her grand plan for Happily Ever After. Maybe John is her destiny. After all, she's losing weight. It can't be a bad thing if she's losing weight, can it?

Connie longs to confide in her girlfriends. They've always discussed their sex lives before, preferably over cocktails. But this infidelity thing makes it a trifle awkward. Connie's not quite sure what she wants. And that's exactly the trouble.

A novel for every woman juggling the untidy mix of work, romance, sex, and marriage, Playing Away shimmers with equal parts comic relief and penentrating insight. Adele Parks has crafted a cunningly revealing portrait of the lives of hip, urban women, poised at the cusp of a millennium.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

What happens to Bridget Jones when she finally marries the wonderful man of her dreams? The much-imitated heroine is named Connie Green this time around, and she's the focus of Londoner Parks's initially humorous but finally enervating debut novel. Only nine months after her wedding. Connie flirts with John Harding, a handsome man she meets at a business conference, and begins an affair with him. Having always considered herself to be a Cosmopolitan woman, Connie oddly ignores the obvious conclusion that what she wants from John is sex. Instead, she believes that roguish John may be her destiny, though she insists she still loves nice-guy husband Luke. Of course the reader knows, as does Connie herself on some level, that the affair can't end well; the inevitability of disaster is overdetermined from the beginning. Parks is astute about male/female interactions, and she has cleverness to spare. It's unfortunate, then, that she squanders it on a tale that doesn't know whether it wants to be a joyously comic romp or a serious commentary on the concept of Happily Ever After. Connie is a frequently unsympathetic heroine who would confound Sigmund Freud, and is likely to alienate readers long before the tale reveals itself as cautionary rather than prescriptive. Even the ending fails to satisfy, being at once inevitable and highly unlikely, drawn more from the soft-focus, dreamy possibilities of cinema than the realities of probable human behavior. One hopes that, next time, Parks won't fritter away her talents on such a predictable story. Agent, Deborah Schneider. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Parks!s first novel is another disappointing imitation of Helen Fielding!s British best seller Bridget Jones!s Diary. Connie is a management consultant in her thirties. She!s a gorgeous blonde, blessed with hip friends, a perfect husband who cooks dinner and pays bills, and a solid career in a London firm. When Connie encounters a handsome colleague at a Paris business convention, she gets sucked into a wild affair. Bored with a lifetime of respectability, she finds herself the pursuer, and he the pursued. He!s an animal, hard for the reader to care about. This is a long, talky book, punctuated by sordid sex scenes, in which too many fashionable clothing labels and gourmet food names are dropped. Too few characters have depth (it!s hard to remember which girlfriend is which). There are a few good one-liners, but the book is exceedingly dull, and its ending is sentimental claptrap. Not recommended.?Joyce Smothers, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Freehold, NJ
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Pocket Books (June 26, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671775464
• ISBN-13: 978-0671775469
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,016,410 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Real and edgy (or "Reasons to NOT Have an Affair"), July 30, 2001

By 

Dianna Johnston "Compulsive Reader" (Joplin, MO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Playing Away (Paperback)

What happens when a good girl has an affair? Read this book and your questions will be answered. Playing Away is a wonderful novel about a fairy-tale marriage and what happens after. Highly recommended to British Literature fans or for those who want to read about the married side of Bridget Jones.

Connie Green Baker has it all: a loving husband, fabulous friends, nice home, great life. So why the affair? It baffles Connie the most -- she loves her husband and is not unhappy in her marriage. But once she meets sexy, uninhibited John Harding at a work conference, something stirs inside her (literally!). Connie suddenly has a one-track mind on the John Harding Train and, try as she might, she can't (or doesn't want to) get off. As an adulteress, Connie again experiences the crazy passionate drama that was a part of her former life, the life she led before she got married. Which is not necessarily a good thing....

And then there are her friends: Sam, Daisy, Lucy and Rose -- each unique in personalities who offer advice and support for dear Connie, who has found herself in quite a predicament. Readers will laugh and smile in recognition, but will also shake their heads in dismay. The story follows Connie through the many stages of her comfortable and seemingly boring marriage and her disappointment of the lustful, bodice-ripping fairy-tale she imagined it to be. Playing Away is more than just a testimony to the awesome dynamics of a marriage -- it's a gritty portrayal of the toll it takes on a restless mind and the mistakes that can be made to fix it.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sultry Affair, August 16, 2000

By 

"liz_war" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Playing Away (Hardcover)

Connie has it all and what many wish for meaning perfect husband, successful career and great friends. However, she risks it all for sultry sex with a player at work who seems to want nothing but her body. Bad Connie but a thrilling read! Buy this book if you are happily yet somewhat restlessly married and are asking the question now what. Experience Connie's affair instead of having one. Save yourself from the agony of cheating as you see how tormented Connie becomes when her so called happy life turns into a self created mess. Can she pull it back together.. I'm not telling..

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An intelligent and honest look at marriage and infidelity, August 29, 2000

By 

CoffeeGurl - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Playing Away (Hardcover)

Is there such a thing as Happily Ever After? That's what Connie Green -- the spunky heroine in Playing Away -- wonders. More importantly, why would a confident and successful career woman with a seemingly perfect husband want to have a sleazy affair with a I-can-get-any-woman-I-want-whenever-I-want man? These are the things that the precocious heroine is battling with. Connie cannot resist John Harding's enigmatic and tenacious nature. Before she knows it, she has begun a steamy and dangerous affair that could make or destroy her life. Connie is confused. She doesn't know what she wants. So she seeks advise from her friends, all of which are too preoccupied with their own love lives -- or lack thereof. Will Connie come to her senses, or will she throw caution to the wind and jeopardize her marriage?

This novel made laugh and cry. There were some scenes in which Connie and John engaged into some pretty racy sex. But there were funny and touching moments as well. I loved Connie's friends -- their get-togethers and witty conversations felt as though I was watching an episode of Sex and the City. However, I frowned at the fact that Connie seemed a little too desperate about John and degraded herself most of the time. It was painful. But the sharp writing and witty characters are the force in this magnificent novel. Playful, sexy, perverse and with a particular brand of sly naivete all its own, Playing Away is a reading investment. I highly recommend it.