Ice creams at Carrington's

So for a little light summer reading and to fill the days till I can dive into the new Robert Galbraith novel, I decided to spend some time with the fourth and latest instalment of Alexandra Brown's Carrington's Department Store Series - Ice Creams at Carrington's.

I know summer is the time for a little light reading on the beach and lazy days but I really struggled with this book. We are reunited with all our favourite Carrington's characters from the series, heroine Georgie and her boyfriend, and owner of Carrington's, Tom along with her best friends Sam and Eddie.

It should have been a joy, as the story is based around Georgie trying to arrange the Mulberry on Sea summer regatta but instead I became disillusioned as our heroine appeared to drift further away from her down to earth roots and become somewhat of a want to be ‘it girl'. No more are the stories focused around our hard working heroine working in her beloved department store, instead she was attending parties on yachts which had me visualising scenes from Revenge with Georgie in the Emily Thorne role. If not on yachts she was being flow across the world to hoi polloi “Sex & the City” style with her best friend Eddie.

I became even more disheartened that Brown's characters seemed to be becoming more and more stereotypical, her best friend Sam's descent into motherhood blues whilst her other friend Eddie seemed to be nothing more than a poster boy for what narrow minded people view gay men as. He grated on my nerves throughout. It also was the shameless use of words such as ‘emosh' instead of emotional or ‘amazeballs', I mean really what age are your target audience 14?

All this capped off with the interviews at the end of the book staged with her fictional characters - they aren't real people!

Disappointed and let down, think it's devastating that what started as such a lovely personal series is drifting into a stereotypical chick lit novel which seems to think the way to boost readership is to have our heroine whisked off to a more glamorous life. My question would be that whilst Georgie seems to be getting all she want is it at the readers expense.

Clearly the next book has already been planned, I just pray it returns the lovely Georgie to a more down to earth scenario focused on her lovely little department store.