This book is, apparently, a reimagining of Vanity Fair. A book that I haven't read, nor do I know anything about.
We meet and follow Becky Sharp as she tries to climb the journalistic ladder. She is gritty and determined, as well as being economical with the truth. She also doesn't really care about whose toes she treads on on the way up. With scant regard to what might happen if she meets them on the way down.
We start at the beginning with her childhood and upbringing. The truth and also how she herself reimagined it! How she inveigles herself into the family of the boss of a newspaper she wants to work on by posing as a nanny. And then when her dream job becomes reality, we see exactly how far she will go to maintain it...
This is a very character driven book - with Becky herself front and centre - so I guess whether you like or dislike her will have a bearing on how much you enjoy this book. For me, she was just enough over the top for me to be able to revel in enjoying her as a character without compromising my own integrity. If that makes sense to you?! She's a tough nut, well, that's what she wants you to think, but there is also a glaring vulnerability that she tries to hide.
The book draws on lots of real life stuff. There are real people and their lives intertwined with the fiction, as well as other events and scandals, and I also believe that Becky's own career highs and lows as a female newspaper editor are not unique.
I also loved the trip down memory lane that this book allowed me. It being set in the 90s and me being of a certain age!
All in all a good solid read that I have no hesitation in recommending. I am now off to read Vanity Fair to see the comparisons everyone else is talking about. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

I really wanted to get into this one, but really didn't like the writing style and so I ended up DNF at around 30%

Becky Sharpe wants to be a success in the newspaper industry but at what cost to herself and those around her.

We are treated to seeing Becky’s childhood events that formed her life and desires. How she copes with relationships while doing anything necessary to further her career and newspaper sales. Can such a life have a happy ending? Read it and see.

A retelling of Vanity Fair. This Becky Sharpe is a tabloid journalist in 1990s London. According to the blurb this will appeal to fans of Curtis Sittenfield’s Eligible. I won’t be putting Eligible on my TBR list anytime soon.

I did not enjoy this book. For me it was overly long and jumped around too much. Had it not be a retelling of Vanity Fair I would likely have DNF’d it. The book was too long and too disjointed for me.

Thanks to Netgallery for the ARC

I wanted to like this Becky but I did not until the end of the book. Until the last third of the book I didn’t feel I knew enough of Becky to sympathise with her. The other characters did not engage me either until the last third of the book. I would read thrillers by this author but not fiction.

I don’t think I can have given the blurb much thought when I chose this book. I imagine it appealed to me because it’s set predominantly in the 1990’s. An era I remember fondly. Becky Sharp is being raised by her disaffected single mother in a quiet town. The cluttered, messy flat they share, the run down school she attends and the mundane, poverty stricken life they lead mean that Becky is keen to change her stars and to become someone. Her mother is a cleaner at the local boarding school and whilst lurking around the grounds at the weekends Becky gets a glimpse of the life she longs for. Young Becky is easy to warm to, she’s not had the best start in life and it’s impossible not to sympathise with her. As soon as she is old enough Becky heads to London in search of a career with a tabloid paper. She starts her club up the ladder by landing a job as a Nanny to the children of the editor of the most popular tabloid paper in the UK. Becky becomes Rebecca, she invents a new backstory for herself and decides early on that nobody is going to get in her way. Rebecca is a ruthless journalist and an even more ruthless human. She’s hard to like, but plenty of the other character in this story make up for that. It’s a dark tale, of how a girl who came from nothing will do whatever it takes to get everything. I was really engrossed in this book and couldn’t put it down. 4 stars from me!

Becky is a very gripping soap opera, covering the '90s through the eyes of Becky: a strong-willed woman who rises from rags to riches in the media world of the tabloid. According to be author it is a retelling of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. I am unfamiliar with this novel, therefore any parallels were entirely lost on me, but I can guarantee that one can read Becky without the need to read/have read Vanity Fair. To me this reads very much like Rebekah Brooks's story, if I were to consider it a re-imaging of something. Again, according to the author it is mainly a work of fiction, but she does such a great job at anchoring it in real life that it left me wondering if the line between reality/fiction has been too blurred. At the core, we find the favourite British story where certain behaviours are being justified by abuse/poverty. Becky is not only a cold individual, unable to warm up even to her own daughter, but also an almost inhuman or maybe super-human individual when it comes to chasing success! It seamed to me that her story, while emotional and working to add a sort of vulnerability to an otherwise cold-blooded person, was subtly used to explain her behaviour, something that wouldn't have been forgiven in an individual with a different up-bringing. It also did a great job of increasing my disgust towards the media, and the tabloid world in particular. It's simply unbelievable how much power the media has, and how much it has impacted countless lives!

But anyway, I am rambling! What stand it that Becky is a compulsive read who will keep you turning the page at a fast pace, wanting more!

Everything a good book should be. Really enjoyed reading it. But please be aware, there are a lot of very sensitive subjects covered, dark episodes throughout.

Becky, Rebecca Sharp, spent her childhood as an only child, with her single unmarried mother. Her mother cleans at a private girls boarding school, where rich privileged girls are educated.
Becky observes from a distance. She often spends time at the school when her mother is cleaning. She knows her way around the school.
Becky is ambitious. She intends to climb the ladder of success. She wants to be a war correspondent for the press. She is ruthless in her ambitions.

Picking up the story in the 1990’s, it covers the media newspapers, tabloid press that Rebecca works for, moving forward with events of the times.
It gives small morsels of the past, while continuing to move forward through the years, into the 2,000’s.
It has very sensitive and dark material subject throughout.
Becky doesn’t mind embellishing the truth, a risk taker, a high achiever, whatever it takes.
Will Becky get what she desires?

Many thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for an advanced e-book copy. Opinions of the book are entirely my own.

Becky is a contemporary re-telling of the much-loved classic Vanity Fair. I didn’t realise this was inspired by Vanity Fair going in until I read the authors foreword at the beginning of the novel. This really added something unique and I’ll confess I’ve never read the classic but did some Google searching prior to reading through this. I enjoyed this unique take on the classic story and found myself invested in Becky’s story and outcome. I loved the 90s contemporary setting and other influences and found the story engaging and easy to follow. The book was well written and the characters had depth in particular Becky. Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for an opportunity to read an arc of this book.

Becky by Sarah May.
From mingling with tabloid millionaires to trading favours and fortunes with royalty, she will stop at nothing to reach the top of the career ladder at the Mercury newspaper. Landing scoop after scoop, Becky ruthlessly carves a place for herself in a society determined to ignore her. These are the biggest stories and scandals of the decade, and she has something to do with every one of them. But Becky may have more in common with the people she writes about than she thinks – what takes a lifetime to build takes only a moment to destroy . . .
A slow but good read. Likeable story and characters. I did try really hard to get into this book and love it.3*.

Total 90s throwback! Exciting and outrageous.

t’s peak 90s London. Shoulder pads are out, crimped hair is in, supermodels are known by their first names, and Becky Sharp will do anything to escape her past.

From mingling with tabloid millionaires to trading favours and fortunes with royalty, she will stop at nothing to reach the top of the career ladder at the Mercury newspaper. Landing scoop after scoop, Becky ruthlessly carves a place for herself in a society determined to ignore her. These are the biggest stories and scandals of the decade, and she has something to do with every one of them.

But Becky may have more in common with the people she writes about than she thinks – what takes a lifetime to build takes only a moment to destroy . .

Unfortunately, this wasn't the book for me.

I found it hard to connect with and warm to the characters, and I was not really interested in what happened to them. It may be because I didn't read the original Vanity Fair and I was not aware it was a retelling when I started the book, so I might have missed some references.

However, the book was well written and I can see people would like it if they are into these kind of things.

Thank you NetGallery and Pan Macmillan for the arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Publication Date: 26/1/23

I really really enjoyed this book!
It’s a rags - riches - rags tale of the formidable, ambitious Becky Sharp, who climbs her way to the top of the cut throat world of journalism and woe betide anyone who gets in the way 😂🤪

The book swings back and forth between her early life and present day (although sometimes confusingly so), with Becky being a character who’s pretty hard to like however I do feel her early life allows some sympathy and understanding as to why she is the way she is.

This book is apparently a sort of remake of Vanity Fair which I haven’t read so went into it a bit blindly however it was so interesting to read and learn how things work on the ‘inside’ when bringing in big news stories, many of which Becky did. There are huge similarities with real life News paper scandals (mainly the death of Princess Diana, the terrible murder of the young teenager Milly Dowler and the NOTW phone hacking scandal) all of which I have lived through as a teen/young adult in the 90’s/00’s, especially poor Milly who lived just around the corner from me so maybe because of this I found it even more interesting?!
4 stars from me!

I found this really odd to be honest. Going into it with the premise of it being a modern version of vanity fair along with influences from other more recent scandals just jumbles the whole thing imo. It would have bn better to just write a book and let is stand aline because all these influences make the book so disjointed and random. Technically all fictions books are influenced by some real world events or another....... I'm not sure why this one feels the need to try and make that a selling point unless it's just to get PR and influence sales. I dont think anyone who was a fan of vanity fair will necessarily be a fan of this one though because it just doesn't work. Especially not with added themes thrown in. Just write a new story and leave it to stand alone.

Becky by Sarah May is a modern retelling of Vanity Fair. As a teenager I loved reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and over the years have watched the many television and film adaptations.

I enjoyed this modern retelling of it set in the recent past of the 1990s and early noughties in London. I also found Becky’s career as a cut-throat journalist, based ostensibly on Rebecca Brooks at News International, interesting. Being set in the recent past I was familiar with the tabloid scandals referenced in the book. Most of the key characters from Vanity Fair appear in Becky, I would stress this book is a modern retelling.

Sarah May isn’t an author I was familiar with, but I will definitely keep an eye out for her books now. Huge thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, Pan Macmillan, Picador, for making this ARC available for me for a fair and honest review.

If you haven't read 'Vanity Fair', watched a TV / film adaptation or have a passing knowledge of the plot and it's characters - run. Run away fast from this book because you will be hopelessly lost. I've seen an adaptation and I WAS LOST for a good chunk of this book.

'Becky' takes Vanity Fair, squashes it down and sets it across three decades of time. Everything is updated to take place in the world of British tabloid culture, as cutthroat and soul-destroying as it is. Becky Sharp is reimagined into a journalist who climbs the ranks through her dubious connections, making plenty of enemies along the way.

There are moments where this book is clever and moments where it's shoving the link to the original in your face so hard, the lines are blurring. Becky's lawyer is called William Thackery for god's sake. We're intelligent people, let's enjoy subtlety. May spends a huge amount of time giving Becky the suitably dire enough childhood to help us feel an ounce of sympathy for this anti-hero (which I just could not give her - there comes a point where you have to realise you're an asshole) - and yet, there are so many elements of the plot that are warped enough that this feels like an original novel, not an adaptation.

Infuriatingly, it's both a retelling and not a retelling - there's a lot of working around plot lines to fit with this new setting. I found myself really frustrated by the writing on multiple occasions - it jumped massively through time without resolving issues or even setting up what was to come, only to plunge you into a new time frame and idea. SPOILER here (I mean, the novel is like 200 years old, come on) - but George doesn't die in this one. There were plenty of wars in this era to send him and Dobbin off to (Dobbin who is barely acknowledged and occasionally passes through scenes with zero reason) - even if it was just as a photojournalist or reporter accidentally caught in the fire - THAT would have been interesting. It was like no other character could be even mildly interesting because there was Becky, at the front.

I don't necessarily think this is a good Vanity Fair adaptation. The setting is what makes got me through it - it touches very briefly on the phone hacking scandals of the 2010s and the power that the tabloids has over British culture. But it was missing the complexity, the relationships - the characters that build the grand tableau of this story! I feel like Vanity Fair is so deep and complex, it's impossible to try and condense that all down into one 400 page novel.

Also, be warned it's got basically every trigger warning going for it and is majorly depressing for solid chunks.

Edit: Having read some reviews, I've discovered there is an influence of Rebekah Brooks in here and it's just made me even more frustrated with this whole sodding book. I spent two weeks trying to read this. Pick your lane and stick with it.

I was unaware that this was based on the novel Vanity Fair and too be honest it didn't matter as I've never read it. I really enjoyed the story and felt bereft when it finished. I felt it could've done with at least two more chapters!

Becky Sharp has an unstable upbringing with a mum who is more focused on men than her daughter this leads her to be aloof and ambitious, doing anything to get to the top.
Also I felt loosely based on the News of the World scandal and why they ended up rebranding.

Full review to come on Goodreads and Amazon. Thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for a review copy.

I found this book overlong and despite an entertaining start it failed to hold my attention. I think that trying to equate it with Vanity Fair means the reader goes in with high expectations. . It's about deeply unpleasant people and events which I found spoilt my enjoyment of this read. I am definitely in the minority with this one though going by the number of 4 and 5 star reviews.

This is an interesting read; a combination of the Becky - Rebecca from Vanity Fair, a rags to riches tale, combined with an interwoven tale linking another Rebekah Brooks - news of the world scandal that creates a tale of the media’s obsession with scandal, Princess Diana and the horrific phone tapping.

The characters are well drawn , just not likeable and for me, although I see it’s a well written book, it’s not one I particularly enjoyed.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to preview.