Fact or Fiction

ANYONE who’s ever been near a tabloid newspaper knows Kerry Katona. The busty, brazen Northern lass, famous for her glamour modelling, Atomic Kitten, and nowadays for no real reason, is now bursting into the world of publishing. Having already penned her autobiography, My Story, detailing her drug-addict mother who sold her out, trying to make it in showbiz and her celebrity marriage to Westlife’s Bryan McFadden, she’s now delighting us with a fictional effort by the name of Tough Love.

In brief, Kerry tells the tale of a busty glamour model Northern lass who has to quit the world of celebrity to move back Up North to be with her junkie mum and the rest of her mad, criminal family, all the while trying to hide the paternity of her 7-year-old daughter. Our heroine, Leanne, prides herself on being down to earth, having tried out the celebrity boyfriends, and settles for a man she’s known for years – but can her brother cope with him? It all ends in tears when one member of her family shops her out to the press regarding who little Kia’s daddy really is. It’s all so startlingly familiar. An amplified, slightly-modified version of the life of Ms Katona, perhaps?

Laced with cocaine, scandal, and more than one dig at the popular press, we ride the ups and downs of Leanne’s roller coaster ride of a life. The lead isn’t perfect, her family a different kind of insane from the usual English eccentrics presented in this genre and it’s a slightly seedier, more dangerous twist on the chick lit novel as we know it.

So what’s wrong with it? Well, all of the above. The lead is so “down to earth” and “normal” and “wants the best for her daughter” that you start to dislike her a bit. She’s always trying to fix things and let her daughter think everything’s normal when in fact, her life’s a mess.

Her family, almost comical with their scary-English-gangster-Lock-Stock-style mannerisms, are a bit too much. Sometimes the plot gets lost to throw in a drug-reference or a beating or a threat and you kind of forget why you’re there.