Jenni from the book

Guess who's back? I've actually been doing better with my reading again lately and after moving another 5 books from my 'Want to read' shelf to my 'Read' shelf on Goodreads, it's time to come back here and tell you what I thought to each of them. Read ahead with caution because as usual, spoilers are to be expected!

I find myself becoming bored with the same old chick lit books, not least because the category as a whole is so hit and miss, with half being amazing and the other half being nothing short of dreadful. So I've been trying to branch out a little more and read books that are maybe not your typical boy-meets-girl story. Like this one, for a start! I'm very aware that the obvious racism that exists in our society is only the tip of the iceberg; the hidden part includes a whole array of racial stereotypes, microaggressions, and various layers of privilege. But being white, there are always limitations to your understanding (and certainly always more you can learn). So I was excited to read a book from a black author, about the very topic of race and privilege. The story is about Emira, a young black babysitter who has a lack of direction in her life and has struggled to climb in the world because of it. But she is nearing 25 and with her health insurance soon to run out, the clock is ticking to figure out her next step. Her white employer, Alix, on the other hand, is a woman who has always gone after what she wants; the career, the husband, the free goodies from brands in exchange for a shout out from her. In fact, she's built a whole brand for herself out of being a confident woman and teaching other women how to be just that. While the 2 women's differences have kept their relationship as a very distant, transactional one, Alix is desperate for them to have a closer, more part-of-the-family type of relationship. But I'm sure she never imagined how the opportunity may come about. The story of the book begins when Emira is babysitting late at night and is stopped by the supermarket security guard, accused of kidnapping the 2 year old she looks after (Briar). Embarrassed and upset, Emira is keen to forget the whole ordeal (despite a bystander having caught it on camera and encouraging her to release it). Alix however, is desperate to try and put things right. From the blurb, I assumed that the story would be largely centred around the supermarket run-in. However, it wasn't at all. It was the event the story started on and ultimately the one it ended on, but all the stuff in the middle was a truly eye-opening and piercing account of the aspects of race that are so ingrained into our society that you could blink and you'll miss them. Like about the things that white people don't even consider or have to worry about, and the fact that Emira's mixed race and Hispanic friends still have more white privilege than she does as a dark skinned woman, and how fetishization of black people and black culture is a lot more harmful than perpetrators would believe. The great thing about this book was that it largely wasn't about racism. It wasn't about some Nazi hooligan who (thankfully) only a very small minority would find any connection to. Alix isn't a racist, she just isn't anti-racist enough to want to educate herself or to make a change in the world. And that blurry grey area is where a huge majority of white people remain. They're the kind of people who don't notice that black people don't have as many opportunities as them (academically, professionally, etc), who pat themselves on the back for knowing and befriending black people, or who have certain ideas about what being black means without ever questioning their own beliefs and where they came from. My only criticism about this book is that sometimes it seemed to create unrealistic narratives to spark a conversation about race. For example, it recounts when Alix became a social outcast at high school because she called the cops when a bunch of popular kids turned up to her house uninvited to throw a big party. The most popular kid, Robbie (who's black) got arrested and subsequently lost his scholarship because he was carrying drugs. Now, I know that black people are unfairly targeted when it comes to crime (a whooole other conversation), but this seemed to be an instance of actual wrong doing, and Alix can hardly be to blame for not wanting her house trashed. I mean, Alix is absolutely batshit crazy in most of her other actions throughout the book, but this one I kind of saw where she was coming from. Other than that though, I only have positive things to say. I loved the writing style of the book and the way you really got to know the two main characters, both in the ways they were in themselves and how they were perceived by each other. If you're after a wildly exciting story where there's another surprise around every corner then this book isn't it. Aside from the supermarket run-in and something at the end, not too much actually happens. But what the author has created in the quiet is a book that will really take you to new depths to think and look inside yourself. After all, the calmest waters show the clearest reflections.

I've heard of Sophie Kinsella of course; she seems to often dominate the chick flick charts and bashes another book out more frequently than any other author I've known. Yet somehow, I'd managed not to have read any of her books before. But since she's such a global best-selling superstar, this book had to be good right? Twenties Girl is the story of Lara Lington who is hiding a lot from her family when she reluctantly attends the funeral of her 105 year old great aunt who none of them ever really knew. Hiding things like the fact that she's secretly adamant that her and her ex boyfriend Josh will get back together, even if no one else agrees with her (he just needs to realise his mistake in breaking up with her out of the blue). And the fact that her best friend and business partner Natalie has run off to Goa, leaving her totally in the lurch with their new (and kind of failing) recruitment firm. So the funeral is pretty much the last place she wants to be. It's also the last place that Sadie wants to be - given that she's the great aunt in the coffin! When Lara starts seeing Sadie's younger self in ghost form, she starts to think she's going mad. But Sadie is a woman on a mission and she demands Lara's help in finding the missing necklace that she loved her whole life. Given that Sadie can't rest without it, and Lara won't get much rest with all of Sadie's screaming and nagging, the two become unlikely accomplices on a mission to recover the missing necklace. At first, Sadie, with her feisty nature and firm opinions about love, life and fashion, begins to wreak havoc on Lara's life. The two seem to have nothing in common but from their sparring comes a friendship and the two women begin to learn that they can help each other. Lara can help Sadie to recover the necklace and uncoil the mystery that surrounds it, while Sadie can help Lara to take charge of her life, get her career back on track and maybe even help her love life move in the right direction too. So this book was a very strange one for me. Because I loved the storyline! I found the whole narrative really intriguing and gripping and I found myself constantly wanting to find out what happened next. But that's the only thing I liked about it. The characters were all unbearable and lazily written from the main ones right down to the tiny supporting characters. Lara was quite frankly, an idiot. Her obsessive thoughts about Josh and them getting back together were nothing short of deranged and her business seemed to be failing with good reason. Sadie was rude and obnoxious and the most selfish person ever (okay so yes, she was dead, so maybe you lose the ability to care for other people's needs when you pass over). And as for the likes of Josh (one dimensional), Lara's mum and dad (again, painted really weirdly old for the parents of a twenty something year old??) and Uncle Bill (insufferable but in fairness, he was kind of supposed to be), it's like the author just couldn't be arsed to remotely develop any of them. The whole set-up surrounding the main storyline was littered with unrealistic and downright nonsensical situations. Like when they're looking for the necklace and Lara just happens to bump into her old college friend who just happens to be a police sketch artist who can perfectly recreate it for her. Or the fact that Sadie died aged 105 and yet somehow her great niece is only like 27? Which means that Lara's grandparents AND parents would've both had to have had their children at like 40? Hands down the absolute worst part of this book though was the writing style. Oh. My. God. The dialogue! It was all awful and felt like it had been written by a small child. To say that it was nearly 500 pages long, no conversation or train of thought were even remotely refined and it felt like we bobbed on the surface for the entire thing. I feel like this book would make an amazing movie adaptation, because then it would have the same storyline but most importantly, it would be written by someone else. I don't want to be all doom and gloom though as I did enjoy the main messages in the book. Messages about family, and heritage, and appreciating time while you have it, and never being too scared to take a leap of faith, and never waiting until it's too late. Mostly I enjoyed the friendship between Lara and Sadie. With one woman in her twenties, and the other from the twenties, these two prove that friendship can blossom in the most unlikely of places and sometimes all you need is a little divine intervention.

Anyone who's been here before will know that this book is a proper bit of me. Abbey Lahey is an over-worked, under appreciated mum of two who is constantly frazzled from running around after her kids, her out-of-work husband and her demanding PR job. When she sees a picture of Alex van Holt (from the old-money van Holt family), in a magazine she starts to wish she had never turned down his offer of a date when he asked her out ten years ago. How different could her life have been if she'd have said yes? Sometimes we all wonder about the path not taken but Abbey is about to find out in a very real way! After falling down a Nordstrom escalator, she wakes up in an alternative reality; the one where she's Abbey van Holt. After realising she (probably) hasn't gone insane and that this is now her life, she begins to settle into her new normal. A normal filled with luncheons and galas and personal stylists and stomping the campaign trail with her would-be congressman husband. As she struggles to work out how and if, she'll ever make it home, she masquerades in the life of Abbey van Holt and discovers that money, wealth and being a lady of leisure isn't all it's cracked up to be. Okay so she now has the money to buy the handbags of her dreams. But she has nothing to occupy her mind or to get her teeth stuck into. And she may finally have the luxury of time with her children but their alternate upbringing has left them spoilt and detached from reality. And she certainly has a husband with more on his plate but she's left feeling lonely and ignored; her opinions never listened to. As the cracks in Abbey van Holt's world start to appear, she realises that life as Abbey Lahey may have had its challenges but it was the life she lived and loved. Will she ever be able to get back to it? Okay, so I really enjoyed this book! It was the author's debut and I think she did a fab job with clearly a lot of research having gone into it. Lots of authors often seem to peg their characters as working in marketing or PR or social media and then there's always these big unrealistic scenarios that transpire from the author thinking they know what these industries are like (as someone who works in them, let me tell you that they don't). Whereas this author kept the world of Abbey's work and expertise realistic which I liked; it came across as genuine and it ended up being important to the storyline too. The rest of the writing style was really great too and I fell in love with Abbey's character a little. My only gripe with the book really was that the crime didn't seem to fit the punishment. The blurb describes the book as a Sliding Doors type saga but in that story, the character doesn't know they're experiencing an alternative reality. Abbey very much knows and so I would liken it more to A Christmas Carol, with her being shown her possible present/future. It almost feels like the universe trying to teach her a lesson for complaining about her perfectly fine life by showing her one that's bad in different ways. But Abbey is fried, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to feel overwhelmed as a working mum with a young child, a toddler and no money. It almost perpetuated that she had no reason to moan in the first place. I mean, the whole story could've easily been cut a lot shorter if Abbey had just made her good-for-nothing husband, Jimmy, pick up the slack. He was a landscaping business owner that was bringing in no work or money since the recession hit. Okay so he got hit by bad luck, but if he's making no money then he should've been the full-time parent. And yet Abbey is bending over backwards to run around after the whole family while he largely sits on his arse? Certainly nothing I would ever stand for. Despite that though, he wasn't an unlikeable character and I love Abbey's flashbacks to moments in their ten year relationship that depict a typical marriage; the falling in love, the dealing with heartache and the growing complacent. That was my favourite part of the book; its realness. It was easy to see how Abbey and Jimmy had gone from two young love birds to two thirty-somethings who'd forgotten how to put each other first. Abbey slowly gained clarity as she found herself in similar marriage scenarios with her alternative reality husband Alex and her musings were thought-provoking and very sharp. Although that was another weird thing for me; how quickly she found it normal to be married to Alex. She was having sex with him in her walk-in wardrobe about 1 day into her time there and surely as a married woman (who knew exactly who she was mentally married to) she would've found this a lot weirder/more difficult? I'll forgive the author one or two niggles though because I really enjoyed this book overall, especially the flash forward in the epilogue. It was a lot more thought-provoking than I expected it to be from the blurb so I guess you really can't judge a book by its cover...

Joanna Bolouri is one of my favourite authors as I love her down-to-earth, realistic and often raunchy books. I'd had my eye on this one for a while but given that it's based around Christmas, I wanted to wait until it was seasonally appropriate to read it. The most wonderful time of the year is the story of forever-single 38 year old, Emily. Her single status has never bothered her that much; after all, she loves her friends, job, car, and apartment. However, it severely bothers her totally crazy family (who are back in Scotland) and so after 8 great months of dating her new boyfriend, Robert, she dares to finally tell her family about him. Ecstatic, they insist that she brings him for Christmas and she cautiously agrees, glad that the festive period might finally be different than the 5 days of grilling she's normally subjected to. But then her relationship with Robert implodes a few days before Christmas and she dreads having to break the news to her family. So, she decides not to. In a drunken moment of clarity, she realises that they can still meet "Robert", it just won't be the real one. So as she heads north for Christmas, it's her party boy neighbour, Evan, who's been roped in to play the part. A lover of loud music and louder sex, twenty-something Evan has been the bane of Emily's life for months and she's determined to win in their war of non-stop bickering. Finally finding themselves on the same side in this "Meet Robert" plot, will the Christmas period go without a hitch? Or will they find themselves in a tangled mess as they try to keep up with their own story, while discovering that there really might be a thin line between love and hate? Well, let me start by saying that it ranks last in the books I've read by Bolouri so far. That's not to say it was bad (it was actually really good), but it's just a very high bar as far as I'm concerned. I really enjoyed the chemistry and comradery between Emily and Evan but it just felt a little less smooth than I'd have liked it; it felt like they bunny-hopped from enemies to friends to more, rather than feeling that something was growing slowly. They had great chemistry though and I really felt the electricity between them. In classic Bolouri style, I loved that they weren't given a happily-ever-after fairytale ending; instead they were given hope with realistic acknowledgments about the challenges they may face as a couple (because of the different paths they were on). This book also had really strong supporting characters and I absolutely loved Emily's crazy family; mostly because their banter, weird games, random traditions and over-sharing nature reminded me of my own family! I really enjoyed the soap opera style of the dramatic parts, and the dialogue was fun and witty. I wouldn't say this was an overly complex book with deeper meaning and lessons to be learned, but it was a super fun, frolicky, festive read that I'd highly recommend!

This book was one that was chosen for me by my Grandma because of the central plot of a lost suitcase (because ours were lost on our Maldives holiday!) and my love of rom-coms, which rivalled the main character Laura's. After growing up hearing all about the irresistible love story that her parents shared before her Dad sadly passed away when she was young, Laura is unwilling to settle for anything less than a soul mate. Forget the dating apps and never-ending swiping; she dreams of experiencing a true hollywood meet-cute, like the couples who she interviews for a living as a journalist. So when she heads to Jersey on a business trip to finally write her parents love story, and she picks up the wrong suitcase at the airport, she thinks her moment has finally arrived. Because when she goes through the suitcase to look for clues about the owner, she is basically presented with her ideal man. A copy of her favourite book, sheet music from her favourite artist, a heavy knit jumper that she recognises from a certain Ryan Gosling sex fantasy of hers; everything points to this being the suitcase of her soul mate. And what better sign from the universe that this is "it" than him being on the same island where her parents fell in love all those years ago. The only challenge is, she has to find him first! As Laura travels the island to write about all the places her parents went together, she's accompanied by surly cab driver, Ted, who only makes the journey more interesting. Helping her to navigate the island and track down her mystery suitcase man, could Ted be more of a main character in this rom-com than she first expected? I actually enjoyed this book way more than I thought I was going to. I mean, I did expect to love it from the blurb, but I thought it could easily just be a simple love story (it's hard to gage the quality of a chick flick book from the blurb alone). The book was actually really well written with so many enticing details about Jersey in it that it's actually really made me want to visit. Laura herself was a pretty good character, although she was evidently a little naive and not all too intelligent given the details that come out about her parents real love story as the book goes on. I loved the slow burn of the build-up between her and Ted though, and the fact that they both had pain and baggage, rather than being one dimensional in their relationship histories. This book may be a rom-com on its surface but I suppose in actuality it was satire. It showed that love often doesn't appear in front of you on top of the empire state building in a Ryan-Gosling-shaped-parcel. It normally shows up when two people who have their own issues and healing to do, have an undeniable spark that convinces them that the work will be worth it. That love is the perfect concoction of chemistry, compatibility and timing, and that we can try and second-guess the power of the universe all we like but we normally won't realise what our destination is until we get there. You just gotta have a little faith.