Rivals by Jilly Cooper

In the 1980s, there was nothing like a good old-fashioned bonkbuster to brighten up your bookcases. With their somewhat stylised but garish covers that declared them to be the sort of book you would probably blush when telling your granny about. As well as the handsome but rakish main characters, they sold in their hundreds of thousands. Jilly Cooper was the Queen of Bonkbusters, famous for the heartless but too-beautiful-to-exist Rupert Campbell-Black who broke hearts all over the world. Rivals was released at the tail-end of the 1980s (1988), but everything about it from the cover to the characters and the situations they find themselves in screams 'this is a 1980s book'. Despite all that, Disney has now purchased the rights and has made the first half of the book into an 8-part mini-series. So...what did I think about it on this re-read that was 15 years in the making? How will a mini-series based on a book that is all about the boardroom and the bedroom work on a family-friendly network like Disney? Find out in the first episode of Season 4 of Being Bookish. UPDATE: I will be releasing weekly commentary on my YouTube channel of the TV episodes, so check those out from 30th October.