I’m pretty sure this novel was one of my Borders’ closing down sale bargains. I remember going into the store in Brisbane city and feeling a mixture of sadness and euphoria as the stack of books I was carrying around got bigger and heavier, while the shelves became barer and dustier. I think I walked out with 12 books in total and only spent around $120. Definitely one of the best shopping trips I’ve ever had. But back to the book.
Twenty Times a Lady tells the story of Delilah Darling (some book characters have the worst names, don’t they?) and her bizarre search for her happily ever after. Delilah is 29-years-old, single and willingly admits that she is, well…easy – she has slept with 19 different men. Delilah reads an article in the newspaper that claims the average person has somewhere around 10 sexual partners in their life and this makes her feel like a bit of a slut, for lack of a better adjective. She decides that her twentieth partner is going to be her last, but then, of course, she jumps into bed with someone she definitely does not want to wake up next to every morning for the rest of her life and has quite the dramatic meltdown. Her altered mental state results in a most unusual road-trip across the United States in search of an ex-lover, which consumes the majority of the remainder of the story. And then, she gets her happily ever after…sort of.
From very early on – and I’m talking chapter two or three – I knew how it was going to end. If this happened in almost any other story I probably would have flipped to the last chapter to prove I was right and then given up reading it. But this story, Delilah’s story, was different. Despite knowing how it would end I still found that I wanted to know how the characters got there. I wanted to see what happened on Delilah’s crazy adventure and how she came to be where she was, and with whom she was with, in the end. And it didn’t disappoint.
While I definitely enjoyed reading Delilah’s story, I didn’t find that it was the type of book I just couldn’t put down and I live for stories that keep you up at night while you tell yourself ‘just one more page’ until you cannot possibly stay awake any longer. But with this in mind, it’s definitely worth a read if you have a little time to spare for a quirky little paperback novel.
NEXT WEEK:
Pop-punk: the genre we love to hate…but still love. (Or at least, I do!)
Words, Sounds & Sunshine 