You know, writing a novel is a major investment of time and energy and it doesn’t always end up being published. I’m sure there are thousands upon thousands of novels all over the world that are locked away in filing cabinets, drawers, hard drives, etc. along with the hundreds of rejection slips for each of them from publishers that just didn’t think it was worth it.

So if a novel is going to be good enough to be published, it darn well better be good enough to be thoroughly edited too. I just finished reading Good In Bed by Jennifer Weiner (published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster) and it has been a long time since I’ve come across a book with so many errors in punctuation and grammar. (more…)

So it turns out that even though I’ve been busy with work and landscaping, and I fully expected to take a couple more days to finish this book, I just couldn’t put it down. Consequently, I picked it up in the late evening and read until 2 AM because I had to finish it. Even when my husband set up the VCR with episodes of Smallville we had taped while we were busy working in the yard, I read this book with only partial awareness of what was going on in the shows. It’s actually taken me more time to write this review than it did to read the book.

Jennifer Weiner has written another great book. The main character, Candace (Cannie) Shapiro, is fantastic. She’s an overweight woman who has decided to take a break from her relationship with her slacker boyfriend, Bruce. Even though she said they’re taking a break, he’s taken the “break” and added “up” to the end and he’s not happy about it. Maybe for some revenge, maybe to heal his ego, or maybe just because he’s an opportunistic jerk, he’s used details from their three-year relationship as fodder for a new column called “Good In Bed” that he’s been contracted to write for a women’s magazine. His columns reveal personal, intimate and embarrasing details about her, and horrified Cannie is feeling like life can’t get any worse, until she discovers she’s pregnant with his child and he wants nothing to do with it or with her. As Cannie progresses along in her pregnancy, she’s forced to look to a future of being a single mom, and living life as a “larger woman” to boot. (more…)

Jennifer Weiner has written a sweet, witty novel about four women, Lia, Becky, Kelly and Ayinde, entering motherhood and realizing that being a mom is not what they thought it would be like. I’m not a mother, so I can’t relate fully to the anecdotal incidents that these mothers encounter, but there are some events that remind me of women I know who do have children.

Each woman in this story is unique and characterized well. There’s Becky, the extremely funny, overweight Jewish woman with the mother-in-law from hell. There’s Ayinde, the beautiful wife living in the shadow of her superstar basketball player husband. Kelly is a woman determined to have everything in adulthood for herself and her family that she didn’t have as a child. And then there’s Lia, a semi-successful actress who has run away from her life in Los Angeles to grieve over the loss of her infant son. (more…)

This is the sequel to Ann Brashares’ Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and it is just as engrossing as the first one was. I know I like a book when I read it in one sitting, and this one took me an evening.

Even though this is marketed as a young adult novel, it’s a worthwhile adult read. It can be nice to pick up a YA novel for a light, simple read that lets you propel yourself back to the days when you were a teenager and your biggest worries were boys, clothes, and your friends. If those were the only things that concern the girls in this book, then I’d recommend it just for the YA crowd, but Lena, Tibby, Bridget and Carmen aren’t normal teenagers. Yes, they’re concerned about boys, clothes and friends, but they also face issues and problems that would stumble even the wisest of adults and they deal with them with a maturity you don’t see in the average teenager, which is what can take this novel up in the intended age levels. (more…)

**Warning: If you haven’t read Something Borrowed and you intend to, don’t read this review yet! Spoilers ahead **

We first met Darcy Rhone in Something Borrowed as the shallow, self-centred, and competitive girl all set to marry her show-and-tell trophy of a fiance, Dex. That novel ends when Dex leaves Darcy for her best friend, Rachel. This infuriates Darcy, not because she was so in love with Dex and they had the perfect relationship, but because he dumped her first, and he did if to be with her plain jane best friend, something she never saw coming.

We knew all along that Dex and Darcy were destined to break up regardless of his affair with Rachel because their relationship was shallow and instable, but we also learn that Darcy cheated on Dex with his groomsman, Marcus. Darcy is even conceited enough to know that she could have gotten away with it if Dex had stayed with her, but unfortunately Marcus also got her pregnant, and the timing was such that Dex would know that he wasn’t the father. So as Something Borrowed ends, we’re happy to know that Dex and Rachel do find their happy ending (or beginning, I suppose) while Darcy is left with exactly what she earned herself: an unwanted pregnancy and total humiliation. (more…)

Maeve Binchy is my “comfort author.” I know when I read her novels that I can escape into the safe, happy zone of my imagination. Her novels are peaceful reads that always leave you feeling happy and comforted.

Her stories are purely character-driven. Every character she creates is someone you can picture from your own life. Every story is realistic and the events could or have happened to you or people you know.

So why would a story that is simple enough to remind you of your own life be so engrossing? Because Binchy brings characters to life better than most authors, and she can make you care about a character that reminds you of your quiet neighbor more than you’d actually care about your neighbor. (more…)

Is it wrong to like a character that carries on an affair with her best friend’s fiance and falls in love with him? Because that’s what’s happened here.

Growing up, Rachel had expectations about turning thirty. She always pictured herself celebrating the big day with her handsome husband in a nice restaurant with their beautiful kids in the care of a responsible babysitter. Now, the big day has arrived and here she is, only there are no children and no husband. Not even a boyfriend.

Her best friend Darcy throws her a birthday party at a trendy bar, and Rachel is determined to have a good time. Normally, Rachel would be described as the quintessential good girl. She’s kind to everyone, helps out family and friends as much as she can, and is always the responsible one watching out for everyone else when they go out to the bar. But at her birthday party, she decides she’s going to let herself have fun and not think about anyone else. She accepts every drink passed her way, and eventually she’s drunk and one of the last people left at the party. Many of her friends have gone home, including her best friend and Dexter, Darcy’s fiance. (more…)

Up until I read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, I wasn’t much of a mystery or thriller reader. I used to read them when I was younger, but they were mostly Christopher Pike types. In other words: the equivalent of the slasher/horror mystery made into movies that groups of junior high kids will go see together. Terribly cliched and easy to figure out halfway through.

I tried adult mysteries since then, but the ones I picked were too Inspector Gumshoe for me to stay interested. For a long time, I thought mystery meant Agatha Christie, which (in my eyes) meant old and grandmotherly.

Then I got my hands on a Dan Brown novel. His mystery thrillers were so engrossing that the gates opened once again for me to try the genre with renewed interest. What I liked about his novels was the suspense, and that glorious feeling like I couldn’t put the book down and go to bed until I knew who did it and why only to be followed up by that sad feeling that the story is over. (more…)

Nicole Sullivan is desperate to bring her low-rated show, Twenty-Four Hours Investigates, up in the ratings so she can secure herself a better job in the big leagues. All she needs is one good story to get noticed.

She decides to run a story centered on a unsolved mystery back in her hometown of Pawley’s Island, South Carolina. She’s taking a big risk with a special live edition of the show, featuring her mother Leonara James, a famous psychic. Leonora is going to hold a seance at the scene of a triple homicide and attempt to speak to the spirits of the three girls who were brutally murdered there fifteen years earlier in an attempt to discover the identity of the killer who is still at large.

Joe Franconi is a big-city cop who, because of a bust gone wrong, has recently been transferred to Pawley’s Island to take over the new position of Police Chief. Apart from the brutal murders fifteen years earlier, nothing ever happens in this idyllic resort town. That is, nothing until Twenty-Four Hours Investigates comes to town. (more…)

The build-up and hype all across the world was making me conjure up so many ideas for what this book would be about and who the Half-Blood Prince turns out to be. Finally, the wait was over. Years passed between Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince, and people flocked to this book with so much anticipation and expectation that I almost think we all would have been a bit disappointed no matter what was written in it. At least I was, as well as most of the people I’ve spoken with who have read it.

It took me two days to read all 600+ pages of the book, and I was only truly satisfied with maybe 150 of those pages. It starts out promisingly enough, with the merging of the magic and muggle worlds’ political leaders, but then that entire aspect basically falls off the pages of the book after the third chapter, never to be noticed again.

There was a lot of filler here. Rowling must have been given a page count to fill by her publishers. You can’t follow up books that were very long with a shorter installment right before the penultimate book. You also can’t charge as much for it that way. So filler must have been necessary. And there was a lot of it, and not even much of it was Quidditch-related, to my surprise. I certainly didn’t care much for the side plots concerning Ron, Hermione, and Ginny. Plus, when the book did focus on Harry and the Prince, it was achingly slow. It felt like the only real action and suspense in the book could be found in the first couple of chapters and the last 75 pages of the book. I think it had fantastic potential to be another brilliant installment of the series if only Rowling had cut out 200 or so pages of the teen angst.

I’m going to go into some spoilers here, so if you haven’t read the book yet and you intend to, stop reading now. I mean it… stop here :)

Spoilers ahead!

I finished Crusie’s novel, Bet Me, and still the new Harry Potter had not arrived in the mail yet. So I picked up Crazy For You because it was thin and I knew I could finish it in a day.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take me a day to finish it. It took two, and that was because I was willing to put it down. If it hadn’t been for long waits in the doctor’s office with nothing but this book to pass the time, it might have taken three.

This wasn’t a terrible book. I just didn’t find it to be a very good book. It’s passable, but not by much.

Quinn McKenzie is living a stagnant life in Smalltown, USA. She’s been teaching art at the local high school and dating the beloved coach, Bill. They live together in a sensible apartment: close to work, decorated with knotty pine furniture, walls painted a neutral, beige color. Lately, Quinn is starting to think of her life as being a little too “beige.” She needs some change, some excitement, she just doesn’t know how to start. (more…)

This is the first book I’ve read of Jennifer Crusie’s chick lit novels and I liked it a lot. It fit my reading need at the time, which was something short and fun because I knew Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was on its way to my door within a few days.

Reading this book reminded me of the teeny-bopper movie, She’s All That, except that this was a version for adults. As the title suggests, the book is about gambling. Not just making bets for money, but gambling on the risks in relationships.

The heroine in the book is named Min Dobbs, and I liked her immediately. She’s a chubby girl with a quick wit, and she knows it. She’s got the same insecurities that all chubby girls have, and she really thinks that the only man who could ever want her won’t be anything like the type of man she would want or be able to get. She’s so sure of this, she’s decided she’s just going to get a cat and forget men altogether. (more…)