High Potential (Ber Carroll, Macmillan, $32.99 tpb, ISBN 9781405038768, July) ***

Katie Horgan is a hard-working Sydney lawyer on the cusp of becoming a partner in her prestigious law firm. Just as she is about to be sent to Ireland as part of her training Katie meets the brilliant and handsome Jim Donnelly, who, like her parents, is Irish. Katie soon settles into the Dublin lifestyle, working in a clinic providing free advice for the homeless and making friends with the warm and quirky Mags. When not working, Katie attempts to track down her long-lost extended family. Her previous attempts to glean information from her mother had resulted in frosty silence. Eventually, disaster strikes and
after a series of miscommunications and shocking revelations Katie discovers that life and love aren’t as black and white as she’d always thought. I enjoyed this book and managed to read it in just two sittings. It is a very decent example of Aussie chick-lit. The ingredients were all spot on-believable plot, an engaging pace, and a very likeable but ever so slightly flawed lead character.

Rachel Wilson is an academic and occasionally works at the Sun Bookshop in Yarraville

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

Tags: ber carroll