Twenties Girl

The thing about lying to your parents is, you have to do it to protect them. It's for their own good. I mean, take my own parents. If they knew the unvarnished truth about my finances/love life/plumbing/council tax, they'd have instant heart attacks and the doctor would say, "Did anyone give them a terrible shock?" and it would all be my fault. 

That was the opening of the book I'm reading. 

It's a Sophie Kinsella book called Twenties Girl. I got it for $3.99 at Goodwill, which turned out to be an excellent deal. There are 435 pages, which means it's less than a penny per page.You should probably read it when you get a chance, but it falls under the genre known as Chic Lit, so if you're a guy, you should probably read it under the covers with a flashlight when your girlfriend's not looking.

It's actually a ghost story. Lara's great-aunt dies and her spirit comes back to haunt her, only it's not so much a haunting as they become good friends (or at least so far, I haven't finished it yet, I'm on page 275). But the aunt comes back in her youth, a spunky woman from the roaring 1920s. And Lara basically thinks she's going insane for seeing a ghost that no one else can see. And there's a missing necklace, a rich uncle, an ex-boyfriend, and a handsome American business man who frowns a lot.

In case you didn't know, all of Sophie Kinsella's books are British because she is British, so when a frowning American man enters the picture, we should all probably take offense, because what is Kinsella implying about our men? Maybe that they are a bunch of unhappy assholes, but you didn't hear it from me, that was the UK impression. I know that American men smile all the time and are quite pleasant.

Essentially, you should read this book. I'm curious to see how it ends.