Customer Reviews

The Pleasures of Helen

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The Pleasures of Helen is one of those disappointing books where the author has a very good idea but does not write well enough to do it justice. Sanders was mainly a writer of thrillers but decided to try his hand here at a straight novel. Helen is a thirty-something single Southern woman living in New York; with a reasonably well-paid but dead-end kind of a job in PR, she is very lonely and aching for love. Her best friend has just got herself a man; Helen is desperate for love but will settle for sex, and the three men she is involved with during the course of the novel are all disappointments in various ways.

Sanders' empathy with Helen is obvious, and his description of her predicament is clear-eyed and accurate. If only he could write better! There's a much better novel inside this struggling to get out. {Maybe it's called Bridget Jones's Diary :-)}