Book (not) Bingo #21
Nobody’s Perfect by Sally Kilpatrick
Vivian Quackenbush enjoys a typical life. She has winesday evenings with her two best friends. Her son is in college. She and her husband, Mitch, are planning the next move for their empty-nester future. But to Vivian’s blindsided surprise…not together.
After nearly twenty-five years of marriage, Mitch wants a divorce. He confesses that he doesn’t love her anymore. He never even liked her chicken salad! Brutal. What is Vivian to do but channel her anger, frustration, and pain into a video she posts online. Ill advised? Perhaps. Cathartic? Absolutely. Overnight, Vivian goes viral. Millions of views and counting-to Mitch’s fury, her son’s embarrassment, her mother’s support, and the media’s delight. For Vivian, it’s a moment of truth: hide or lean into it. Vivian 2.0 chooses to lean-maybe even toward the younger single father next door.
Now Vivian is wondering where she goes from here. She’s discovering that somewhere in her trending if upended life, she’ll have to figure out who she really wants to be.
According to Amazon, Sally Kilpatrick is a USA Today best-selling author with seven novels under her belt. So, even though I’d never heard of her, when this book popped up as a free “First Reads” selection, I figured it was worth trying.
On the plus side, Nobody’s Perfect was an easy read, one that definitely did not require a great deal of focus or work. The writing was sound. The characters were reasonably well-developed, if not always consistent or consistently likeable. There was some humor, although I didn’t find the book “laugh out loud” funny as reported by some of the few Amazon reviewers.
On the minus side, there wasn’t much plot to the book. I felt most of the humor fell somewhere between “juvenile” and “strained.” Perhaps one just has to be within a certain age range to find people in their mid to late forties going through parallel mid-life crises funny … but I found Vivian to be least likeable when she was going through her “crisis” parts of the story.
Since, again, there’s not much plot to the book, there’s really not much more to say. It was an okay book, but not at all my cup of tea, and I have no interest in checking out other books by the author. Also, I can’t think of anyone who reads these reviews who would enjoy this book any more than I did, so I can’t recommend spending money on it.