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From:Jane Green , Plume ,
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User Rating: Amazon Sales Rank:#16419 |
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 Fun to read., 2008-10-18
A good chick lit book. Entertaining, but not ground breaking. No original or new ideas. Just fun observations about suburban Connecticut and London.
1 of 1 customers found the following review helpful:
 Definitely Fun!, 2008-09-26
I usually give chick lits a three-star for various reasons; they're easy to read and it doesn't take much mental energy to read them; they're predictable; they're usually the same, where woman meets boy, falls in lust and gets her heart broken or captures her prince; it's always about single women. I love them. I really do. They used to be my secret ... after all, what serious reader wants to admit she reads them? Well, this one does.
And this one really is fun. I am a married housewife with two small children and though my house is not a McMansion and nor do I wear fancy designer duds, I relate to the peer pressure that is among the women here and always worrying about how the kids are coping in school and so on. I don't always miss my single days but I do remember the feeling of freedom on occasion. So this book is fun. It's fun to read about Vicky, the single girl suddenly transformed into the worst of America (those Stepford wives? They are my personal nightmare!), a Stepford wife, without the sex, of course. Then there's Amber, a mom of two young kids and happily married to Richard, who is a Wall Street guru. She misses her single days and thought the swapping would be fun ... what mom hasn't dreamed of leaving the kids and hubby for a few days just to relax and not have to worry about spit-ups or dinners or rushing all over town for errands or heaven forbid, to keep up with the Suzys. (You just have to read this book to understand the Suzy reference.)
So kick back and relax. This book is definitely fun. If you can't swap lives with someone else, this is the next best thing ... ok, to be honest, it's better than the next best thing. Most of us really don't want to leave our kids and hubby, so it's safe to say that it's fun to imagine for a few hours, "what if I did ..."
9/26/08
Interesting topic but the book needed more substance, 2008-08-27
Jane Green is one of my favorite authors, but she spent too much of the book describing the characters lives before they switch places (the swap didn't occur for over 200 pages in the book which is more than halfway!). The lives of the women are interesting yet the time in which they swap needed more substance, more detail. I felt like as soon as they swapped, Green shared a few stories and then they switched back quickly.
discovering that you've got everything you want, 2008-08-10
Jane Green seems to keep on writing roughly the same book: a woman goes through an internal crisis of some kind, somehow manages to step outside her life so that she can gain perspective, gains some self-confidence, and everyone lives happily ever after. I don't mean this as a complaint. I bought the book because I was in need of a quick mindless read, and I got exactly what I was looking for.
In this book, we've got Vicky (30-something editor of a fashion magazine, never married, desperately wants to find Mr Right and settle down) and Amber (30-something mother of two, living the cliched lifestyle in the McMansion). After whinging about her life for too long, Vicky's magazine sets her off on a swapping lives adventure so that she can walk for a month in the shoes of a married woman who has everything that Vicky says she wants.
The story is just as predictable as you might expect. Amber loves working again and realises that her keeping-up-with-the-Joneses lifestyle isn't the one that she wants, Vicky realises that she has a fantastic life and deserves a great guy instead of a series of doomed-from-the-start relationships.
Was this a good book? Goodness no, not by any means. But it wasn't bad, either. It's the literary equivalent of junk food. Junk food is nice to have every once in awhile, but I can't stand a steady diet of it, and I can't stand a steady reading diet of books like this.
1 of 1 customers found the following review helpful:
 superficially boring, 2008-07-28
I just don't get it. The cover is great and it ends there. I can't think of a more boring superficial story. I am on page 65 and I am not sympathetic to either main character yet. It is kind of like describing a TBS edited version of Sex and the City. Not my cup of tea, this one is off to the recycling bin or the library donation.
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