No Dress Rehearsal

No Dress Rehearsal is a very short story by my beloved Marian Keyes. It's about 75 pages in a small book with big type. Not quite a short story, so I guess it would be called a novella. In the first few pages, Lizzie is in a biking accident, and although she doesn't realize it for a while, she dies. The rest of the book is about Lizzie trying to adjust to her new reality, including doing her very best to make sure she is not literally late for her own funeral. The thing I liked the best about this story is that Lizzie did have all of the cliched problems of a heroine in a light women's fiction book- she had a boyfriend who wouldn't commit, a chocolate habit, trouble quitting smoking, a dead-end job, etc. The difference is that she died, which certainly put a new spin on things. It became crystal clear that she was wasting her life with these things that did not make her happy. In the end, she was able to talk to her friend Siobhan in a dream and convince her not to make the same mistakes. Very enjoyable little read.