Katie Price: 'Paradise'

Warning: This article contains language and/or sexual references that younger readers are advised to avoid.

Earlier this year, we gave you our thoughts on the paperback edition of Katie Price's latest memoir You Only Live Once. This time around, we've thumbed through the softcover version of her last novel Paradise. Like her previous literary works, the book is a collaboration with Price's usual ghost, Rebecca Farnworth. We presume that it's Rebecca who does all that boring and time-consuming typewriter stuff after she and KP sit down together and work out the story.

Paradise is the third part in the 'Angel Trilogy', following Angel (2006) and Angel Uncovered (2008). If you've not kept up with the (s)exploits of our character, worry not! Even newbies will pick up the threads very, very quickly. To set things up here, our Angel wakes up in Santa Monica with her baseball star boyfriend Ethan Turner. She's a glamour model, a great mum to her daughter Honey, and still nursing a broken heart after her split from unfaithful husband (and ex-Chelsea footballer) Cal Bailey.

As you might guess, the art/life line is one that's often blurred in the world of KP/Angel. This isn't autobiography, but Pricey has certainly taken the adage of writing what you know and running with it as far as she can. Readers of her non-fiction (or interviews) will recognise countless little details from her own life sprinkled throughout the text. There's the "crippling post-natal depression", the pressures of making reality telly, the pain of sharing a daughter with a soon-to-be-ex-husband, and of course the constant, unending attentions of "the paps". Put it this way, if you're a fan of The Katie Price Experience in all its glossy/reality TV/tabloid forms, Paradise will be right up your street.

Sure, this stuff isn't Dostoyevsky. Truth be told, it's not even Dan Brown. The dialogue is sparky, though (you can imagine many of Angel's words spilling from Pricey's mouth), and while the text hops between third-person observation and Angel's internal monologue, it doesn't really jar. There's the odd clunky bit of reference-explaining we could do without - especially when the characters give point-by-point outlines of The Shining and Single White Female in conversation. For a bonkbuster, there's not much here to trouble the Bad Sex Awards, or upset Kay Burley's Waterford Crystal. The sex is frequently glossed over as "making love" or celebrated/dismissed as an "intense f**k", until about 250 pages in, where Angel "free(s) his hard c**k, which she longed to feel inside her" before orgasming in "delicious exquisite waves". Even then, she's soon "f**king a deep, intense f**k" and it's all over before you know it.

But as the entertaining (and bizarre) twists pile up towards the end, it's hard to suppress a grin. If undemanding airport chick-lit is your thing, Paradise is a pretty fun and harmless way to kick off your summer holidays. Armchair shrinks will also have a field day unpicking Pricey from Angel and, given the obvious parallels, this works as a fine companion piece to You Only Live Once. After you get going, the pages flit by effortlessly as you get embroiled in Angel's Big Decision - back to her ex Cal or onwards with new fella Ethan. Pick your Team, do up your seat-belt, get the handsome steward to bring you a couple of those cute gin miniatures and you'll get off the plane with a daft smile on your face, all ready for the beach.

Paradise is out now in paperback via Arrow Books.