Customer Reviews
Not the lightweight novel it at first seems! - By: LindyLouMac, 22 Oct 2008 
This is the first novel by Helen Fielding of Bridget Jones fame which she wrote in 1994. Surprisingly I never read until now. It is a satirical story full of both ridiculous & tragic events about what happens when celebrity aid comes to the help of famine relief in Africa. It is this angle that makes this novel more than just another chick lit type novel. It is I read a subject Helen Fielding is interested in & she has worked in producing documentaries for relief for such famines.
The heroine Rosie Richardson is living in London, working in publishing when we first meet her. After a disastrous relationship with Oliver Marchant a minor television celebrity who turns out to be cruel & manipulative she becomes disillusioned with her lifestyle. As a complete life change she heads for Africa to work as a Director of a refugee camp, for a charity. Four years later famine strikes & desperate for funds Rosie decides to use her celebrity acquaintances to raise emergency funds by organising a television appeal from the camp itself.
Towards the end of the novel the descriptions of the human suffering are powerful & disturbing. It is fourteen years since this novel was written & sadly many parts of the world are still suffering in such a way, despite worldwide campaigns to try & reduce such incidents.
I quote from the novel direct as I think it is an excellent reaction of the horrors as viewed by the aid workers & celebrities. `It was such a monumental horror that it felt as though nothing should be the same any more, nothing should continue: none of us should speak or do anything, the sun should not be moving across the sky & the wind should not blow. It did not seem possible that such a thing as this could be taking place without the world having to shudder to a halt & think again.'
This might start out seeming like a lightweight novel but it certainly does not leave you feeling that way at the end!
Something a bit different. - By: Essex Girl, 21 Mar 2005 
Fielding writes well when she writes about girls in publishing, when our heroine Rosie, goes to Africa on a promotional trip her priorities change & she realises how shalllow her life was in London, thus giving her the strength to walk away from her relationship to go & help in a refugee camp. Four years on & there is a potential crisis. The camps need food urgently & bureaucracy is getting in the way so Rosie takes matters in her own hands & uses her contacts to get a media appeal up & running.
I don't want to go into anymore details but the book is lovely, though it is emotional. Rosie's original London character is a bit pathetic, but she comes out the other side. The book is griping & entertaining but not particularly challlenging, although the subject matter is a bit different from most books in the chick lit genre.
Better than Bridget Jones - By: , 09 Jul 2001 Those who found the succès fou of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones books too fou for their taste may yet appreciate Cause Celeb.
This novel is not just for the Melissa Bank set but will also satisfy those who have graduated to Diane Johnson & Francine Prose. How ironic, then, that Fielding wrote Cause Celeb before Bridget Jones's Diary, & published it, in 1994, in Britain. Bridget Jones's many fans will recognize a prototype of their heroine in Cause Celeb's narrator & protagonist, Rosie Richardson. Rosie quickly tires of self-absorption & neurotic romance with a glamourous Londoner, & throws herself into famine relief in Africa. She is not so naive, however, as to try to escape her past, & ultimately the two strands of the tale become one. Rosie displays a keen sense of humor whether she is rubbing shoulders with show-biz personalities or muddling along in the refugee camp-and isn't humor exactly the quality that would enable a person to get through either situation more or less sane?
Don't worry: Cause Celeb doesn't play famine relief for laughs-or fawn over fashionable people who do their bit to help. This is a deft, subtle, admirable, pleasurable book.
Actually preferred the cassettes! - By: , 21 May 2001 
The cassettes, narrarated by Bernadette Quigley, are reallly fun. They carried me through a dull patch of a long car trip, Florida to Chicago! Her accents & spirit were reallly amazing, & gets better & better. This is def. a case of the cassette being better than reading it...I tried reading it about a month before the tapes, & had a hard time getting into it (usuallly it's the other way around for me).
The book isn't great over alll, but it reallly has it moments, the narrator reallly has fun with it (at times she's just a hair away from a Monty Python skit, at other times, she's pretty intense).
I highly recommend this cassette OVER the book, for a fun, light & spirited car ride.
Brilliant - By: , 17 Aug 2000 Couldn't put this one down. Easy to read & gripping, fast paced tale. Well done to Helen Fielding. More like this please.
