If you were to judge these two books by their covers, you might be deceived into thinking they were pretty much identical, for each is adorned with a photograph of an attractive young woman striking a pose of carefully-arranged bemusement. "Maiden at the crossroads!" they declare to the wary reader. "Sharp, sassy romantic fiction - self-deprecation, a series of tiffs and a happy ending."
A comparison of the plots appears to confirm the suspicion. Suddenly Single's Alix Callaghan is a workaholic broker (is there any other kind?) whose boyfriend dumps her for a French earth mother; The Skywriter's Dominique Dempsey is a child soap star who grows up fast when tragedy decimates her family and she is forced (oh, yes) to marry a famous soccer star, now retired; so far, so gliterati.
What's between the covers is what counts, however, and it quickly becomes obvious that O'Flanagan has chosen to take the standard romantic fiction route, all damp Chanel and Donna Karan and nights of passion in all-white apartments. Having created a lively and vivid cast, she proceeds to manipulate it with some skill - and even if, like this reader, you find the minutiae of daily life in the dealing room tiresome in the extreme, the result is an amiable, though hardly challenging, read.
Prone's is an altogether more ambitious book, knocking on the doors of some very serious subjects - sudden death, obsession, the nature of love itself. The last thing you expect from a romantic novel is a denial of the importance of all-consuming passion, yet that's what The Skywriter gives us, and very convincingly, too. Light but never trivial, it casts an acerbic eye on the excesses of the media age, eschews the kind of product name-dropping which so often passes for cleverness - and contains nuggets of hilarity, mostly toddler-related, which would do Bridget Jones proud.
