100 Books in 2011 [20 - 25]
Read: 25
To Go: 75
Book List
1. Happy Ever After - Nora Roberts
2. The Bone Cage - Angie Abdou
3. Unless - Carol Shields
4. No Rules…Just Write - C. Noelle Susice
5. All My Friends Are Dead - Avery Monsen and Jory John
6. The Best Laid Plans - Terry Fallis
7. The Case for Falling in Love - Mari Ruti, PhD
8. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
9. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery - Quobna Ottobah Cugoano
10. Stig of the Dump - Clive King
11. The Conversations - Michael Ondaatje
12. The Birth House - Ami McKay
13. Essex County - Jeff Lemire
14. Mary-Anne Saves The Day - Ann M. Martin
15. The Werewolf of Fever Swamp - R.L. Stine
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - J.K. Rowling
17. The High Road - Terry Fallis
18. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You - Peter Cameron
19. Ominous - Kate Brian
20. Palestine - Joe Sacco
21. Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen
22. The Borrowers - Mary Norton
23. Very Valentine - Adriana Trigiani
24. Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert
25. Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin
Palestine - Joe Sacco
Palestine follows “Joe,” a caricature of Sacco, during the two months he spends in Palestine on a work visa, from late 1991 to early 1992. In that time he makes it his mission to get the real story from Palestinians, the story that most Westerners don’t see, because all they hear is the Israeli perspective.
The ideal itself is novel; fantastic, even. The fact that he’s made tangible an experience that isn’t easily accessible for most people, by putting it into graphic novel format, is fantastic - visualizing a struggling Arab nation becomes much more possible.
However, you’ll be lucky if you actually glimpse the pictures while you’re struggling through the mass of text.
While Palestine was informative - in order to effectively do what he wanted to do, Sacco had to include a lot of historical information on Israeli-Palestinian clashes - it was a little too dense for a graphic novel. More often than not I found the text overwhelmed the page in a way that detracted from Sacco’s considerable artistic talents; the pictures were incredibly detailed, but I was so busy following the words that, unless I really stopped reading, I didn’t pay attention to them.
A picture tells a thousand words; assumedly, you don’t need to accompany said picture with the thousand words it’s supposed to communicate, and that’s where Sacco went wrong.
However, I liked that he made Joe a mostly unlikeable character. He was often seen as rude, unthinking, selfish, and greedy, and, because of that, debunked this cultural myth of journalists being heros. Joe’s role was also to highlight the Western mentality of seeing other countries (Palestine being one of them) as uncivilized and even a little barbaric despite the fact that we are often the uncivilized ones (i.e. when Joe sat down to a meal with a very poor Palestinian family, and ate them out of house and home without thinking about it).
For the most part, I didn’t enjoy Palestine; it was a little too dense, regardless of subject matter, and eventually everything starts to get repetitive (which is not to downplay the sufferings of a nation and the squalor in which they’re forced to live). However, it did one thing that the media has failed to do: cover a point of view that needs to be heard. One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, and all that jazz (to be cliche).
Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen
Water For Elephants flits between 23-year-old, newly orphaned Jacob Jankowski after he jumps onto a moving train and unknowingly joins the circus; and 90-year-old (or 93-year-old, he’s not really sure) Jacob Jankowski as he lives out his days in a nursing home with painfully sub-par food and (for the most part) awful nurses, while awaiting the day when his oldest son will come to take him for a day out to the circus.
Going into the book, I was both interested and a little hesitant. Given that it’s been turned into a movie with Robert Pattinson, the man of 20 expressions that all look the same, as Jacob, I must admit I had low expectations for the book; when I’d picked it up at Indigo, it had been an impulse buy. However, when I started reading it today, I found that I couldn’t put it down. And after finishing it, I was almost moved to tears. Not very many books are able to do that to me.
The plot itself surprised me, as well. I can’t say I’ve ever read a story in which a man jumps onto a passing train and becomes part of a circus, so it’s not like I could revert to familiar tropes, but I certainly didn’t expect the twists and turns that I got. Though the storyline originally seeming rather calm and staid, with undertones (or, at times, overtones) of sensuality and lust, the second half of the book upped the ante; during that time, I read for four hours straight and couldn’t put the book down. It refused to let me go. And the final chapter gave me just the closure that I needed, tying the book up nicely in a feel-good (if not a little cliched) ending.
I couldn’t get over how real the characters were; I’ve always thought that the mark of a good book is when its characters have the power to make you happy, to make you angry, to make you weep, and to make you relate to them. Water For Elephants did all of those things - whether it was August, the cruel animal trainer, making me seethe with anger, or Jacob and Marlena’s love affair that made my heart ache, or Rosie the elephant whose precocious behaviour always had me smiling.
All I can say is that the movie can’t possibly measure up to this book. There’s no way it’s possible, and I’m anticipating disappointment in the theatre. Because Water For Elephants was too good for words (and one of the stand-out books that I’ve read this year, by far).
The Borrowers - Mary Norton
In The Borrowers, Mrs. May, our narrator, tells Kate, her young charge, of the “borrowers,” Pod, Homily, and Arrietty Clock, a family of three that her younger brother came to know when he was ten years old and staying in his great aunt Sophy’s house. Arrietty, discontent with being kept in her family’s little house under the kitchen, insists that her father takes her with him on one of his borrowing trips upstairs, where she meets “the boy.” He and Arrietty forge a friendship that at first proves beneficial for the pint-sized family, but ultimately causes them to “emigrate” - or so we’re left to assume.
Out of all the children’s novels I’ve read this semester, The Borrowers has been the “toughest” read, but probably the best (barring Harry Potter, of course). The narration wasn’t overbearing and irritatingly didactic, nor was the main character, Arrietty, an overly caricatured version of children her age, as I’ve come to expect from novels directed to younger audiences. In that sense, it was a pleasant read.
I did find Homily, Arrietty’s mother, to be particularly grating though. There was never a happy moment for that woman unless she was acquiring new things for her tiny little home - whether it be trinkets from Aunt Sophy’s drawing room, or pretty dollhouse furniture from the attic, Homily was in her element when she was decorating (and redecorating) her modest home. If she wasn’t able to do that, she’d either be nagging her daughter (quite shrilly, I might add), or complaining about how she and Pod used to be rich before Arrietty was born. Homily was almost a little stereotypical of how Victorian women were portrayed (I’m under the impression that The Borrowers took place in this time period, anyway, so it’s not hard to make that leap in logic).
Regardless, I liked it. It’s a good, quick read, even for older audiences. It just wasn’t spectacular.
Very Valentine - Adriana Trigiani
Very Valentine follows Valentine Roncalli, a 33-year-old apprentice to her grandmother’s wedding shoe-making business, as she attempts to juggle a trying job, a hectic family life, and a romance with chronically busy and neglectful chef Roman Falconi. Given a plot summary similar to this, one could safely assume that it would be a fun and frivolous read, and could be filed away in the chick lit genre.
That would be a generous overstatement.
Valentine, a nauseating and overdramatic narrator, spent the majority of the novel making quips about her family, the stereotypical and dramatically caricatured version of a “normal” Italian clan, and was constantly referred to as “the funny one.” Despite this label, there was nothing she said that was remotely amusing; all of her comments regarding “what Italian people like” toed the line between good natured humour and hipster racism, and left me dissatisfied. I didn’t get to know a nuanced, interesting family; I just felt like I was reading about what everyone expects an Italian family to sound and act like. It was as if Trigiani was trying to cater to culturally assumed tropes, which ultimately did her a disservice. People are more three-dimensional than that.
What I found to be the most painful, glaring flaw was the sexist undertones of the story; there were entire segments in the novel on how men bettered with age, whereas women just aged - and that was portrayed as an unflattering process that all women should strive to hide for as long as possible. Valentine’s mom went a step further by insisting that to keep her husband’s affections from straying, she had to defy the aging process, and keep herself dressed up at all times - basically, at the age of 60, she was still acting like a sex kitten because she didn’t trust her husband enough to assume that he loved her based on her personality. Over and over again, this sentiment was repeated: if you want to keep your man, you better doll yourself up until the day you die because your personality will never be enough.
Frankly, I think men deserve a bit more credit than that. And so do women.
If the female characters weren’t telling each other to dress younger than their years and in other ways defy the aging process in order to keep their men hooked, they were blaming themselves for the faults of their partners - at the very least, Valentine did. Every time Roman deserted her, she would get mad for a little while and then inevitably find some way to turn the blame on herself. And when she came to her realization that they just weren’t meant to be, she didn’t blame him for his flakiness in the least; she rationalized it, by claiming that she, like Roman, wasn’t as invested in the relationship as she could have been; not once in the book did her narration back this assertion up.
To Trigiani’s credit, Valentine, though ridiculously whiny and childish, transcended the not-so-closet sexism and found that she didn’t quite fit the shoe she thought she would (oh, come on, I had to use a shoe metaphor at least once). Instead of straining to fit herself into Roman’s life, she chose to live her own (not before uttering some inane sentiment about Roman deserving to be put first, which she couldn’t do at this time in her life - forgetting, of course, that he’d never put her first during their entire relationship, and had actually ditched her in a foreign country).
Beyond that, the prose itself was riddled with misplaced and dangling modifiers, incorrect punctuation use, and an overabundance of flowery purple prose. There was much more telling than showing - for example, the narration was constantly saying that Roman was charming and wonderful, but his mannerisms rarely confirmed it - and the narration itself lost focus several times; I’d be in the middle of reading dialogue, and then find two paragraphs later that, at the slightest provocation, Valentine was off and rambling about some random, often irrelevant, memory or thought, and didn’t return to the point at hand until pages later. It was a jarring and unpleasant experience, to say the least.
Suffice it to say, I wouldn’t recommend the book. The only reason I actually finished it was so I could add it to my book total.
Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert
If you could spend a year in three different places (four months a piece), where would you go?
For Elizabeth Gilbert, a woman suffering depression and in the midst of a horrible divorce and toxic post-separation love affair, the answer was Italy, India, and Indonesia; the mission of her year-long trip was to experience pleasure, spirituality, and to learn how to balance both - one goal per destination. This true story chronicles Liz’s year-long journey of self-imposed “alone time” while she rediscovers who she is, and the key to achieving and maintaining happiness.
From the very first sentence, I was hooked. Gilbert’s brutally honest, clever, and funny narration kept me engaged in her story, and I never once wanted to put the book down. Her story was so inspiring, especially because she was able to overcome depression with minimal use of drugs and her own sheer will-power to pull herself out of it.
I don’t think I could have asked for a more emotionally available narrator; Gilbert was, as I mentioned before, willing to be brutally honest with her readers about her thoughts, feelings, strengths, and weaknesses, and it only benefitted her.
I would definitely recommend Eat, Pray, Love for its raw, powerful narrator and story, as well as the humour that Gilbert often inserts into her writing.
Oh, and, for the record, I’d spend the year in England, Germany, and China - certainly not for the food and spirituality; just to satisfy my interest in living in countries that I’ve always wanted to visit.
Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin
We all had, or currently have, that friend. You know the one. The one whose life seems to just naturally fall into place. She doesn’t have to try too hard at anything at all, because luck is always on her side. She’s a real winner. However, often this comes at the expense of your own self esteem - she may be a real lucky gal, but she lacks in the tact department. Every moment must be about her, and if it’s about you then she’ll find a way, subtly, to either make it less special for you, or to change the focus back to her. Let’s face it, here: she’s not really a friend. (And if you have never had a friend like this, chances are you were that friend.)
Welcome to the life of Rachel White, who often finds herself measuring her own life against her best friend Darcy’s, who is the type A winner. She went to a sub-par university, only to end up with a better job than Rachel; she’s the “pretty” one; and she’s a real attention hogger. Even on Rachel’s 30th birthday, where this story begins, Darcy manages to outshine her best friend.
However, tables are turned when, tipsy and a little loose, Rachel sleeps with Darcy’s fiance (and her own college buddy), Dexter.
Goody Two-shoes Rachel finds her life suddenly full of the romance and rule-breaking that she’s managed to avoid for a full thirty years, as she and Dex sneak around behind Darcy’s back in the months leading up to her best friend’s wedding.
As someone who has had that friend, Emily Giffin’s Something Borrowed was a satisfying and relatable read. As malicious and awful as the sentiment is, there’s something ridiculously appealing about seeing a character like Darcy have something taken from her by the underdog who truly deserved to be happy. The nature of the story is so alluring to those women (and I know there are many) who work their butts off only to find their glory and triumphs usurped by a friend who really isn’t much of a friend at all.
Though Something Borrowed is very much a chick-lit novel, it’s a great one and I’d definitely recommend it.
- Kelsey
In other news
To Go: 75
Book List
1. Happy Ever After - Nora Roberts
2. The Bone Cage - Angie Abdou
3. Unless - Carol Shields
4. No Rules…Just Write - C. Noelle Susice
5. All My Friends Are Dead - Avery Monsen and Jory John
6. The Best Laid Plans - Terry Fallis
7. The Case for Falling in Love - Mari Ruti, PhD
8. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
9. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery - Quobna Ottobah Cugoano
10. Stig of the Dump - Clive King
11. The Conversations - Michael Ondaatje
12. The Birth House - Ami McKay
13. Essex County - Jeff Lemire
14. Mary-Anne Saves The Day - Ann M. Martin
15. The Werewolf of Fever Swamp - R.L. Stine
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - J.K. Rowling
17. The High Road - Terry Fallis
18. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You - Peter Cameron
19. Ominous - Kate Brian
20. Palestine - Joe Sacco
21. Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen
22. The Borrowers - Mary Norton
23. Very Valentine - Adriana Trigiani
24. Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert
25. Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin
Palestine - Joe Sacco
Palestine follows “Joe,” a caricature of Sacco, during the two months he spends in Palestine on a work visa, from late 1991 to early 1992. In that time he makes it his mission to get the real story from Palestinians, the story that most Westerners don’t see, because all they hear is the Israeli perspective.
The ideal itself is novel; fantastic, even. The fact that he’s made tangible an experience that isn’t easily accessible for most people, by putting it into graphic novel format, is fantastic - visualizing a struggling Arab nation becomes much more possible.
However, you’ll be lucky if you actually glimpse the pictures while you’re struggling through the mass of text.
While Palestine was informative - in order to effectively do what he wanted to do, Sacco had to include a lot of historical information on Israeli-Palestinian clashes - it was a little too dense for a graphic novel. More often than not I found the text overwhelmed the page in a way that detracted from Sacco’s considerable artistic talents; the pictures were incredibly detailed, but I was so busy following the words that, unless I really stopped reading, I didn’t pay attention to them.
A picture tells a thousand words; assumedly, you don’t need to accompany said picture with the thousand words it’s supposed to communicate, and that’s where Sacco went wrong.
However, I liked that he made Joe a mostly unlikeable character. He was often seen as rude, unthinking, selfish, and greedy, and, because of that, debunked this cultural myth of journalists being heros. Joe’s role was also to highlight the Western mentality of seeing other countries (Palestine being one of them) as uncivilized and even a little barbaric despite the fact that we are often the uncivilized ones (i.e. when Joe sat down to a meal with a very poor Palestinian family, and ate them out of house and home without thinking about it).
For the most part, I didn’t enjoy Palestine; it was a little too dense, regardless of subject matter, and eventually everything starts to get repetitive (which is not to downplay the sufferings of a nation and the squalor in which they’re forced to live). However, it did one thing that the media has failed to do: cover a point of view that needs to be heard. One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, and all that jazz (to be cliche).
Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen
Water For Elephants flits between 23-year-old, newly orphaned Jacob Jankowski after he jumps onto a moving train and unknowingly joins the circus; and 90-year-old (or 93-year-old, he’s not really sure) Jacob Jankowski as he lives out his days in a nursing home with painfully sub-par food and (for the most part) awful nurses, while awaiting the day when his oldest son will come to take him for a day out to the circus.
Going into the book, I was both interested and a little hesitant. Given that it’s been turned into a movie with Robert Pattinson, the man of 20 expressions that all look the same, as Jacob, I must admit I had low expectations for the book; when I’d picked it up at Indigo, it had been an impulse buy. However, when I started reading it today, I found that I couldn’t put it down. And after finishing it, I was almost moved to tears. Not very many books are able to do that to me.
The plot itself surprised me, as well. I can’t say I’ve ever read a story in which a man jumps onto a passing train and becomes part of a circus, so it’s not like I could revert to familiar tropes, but I certainly didn’t expect the twists and turns that I got. Though the storyline originally seeming rather calm and staid, with undertones (or, at times, overtones) of sensuality and lust, the second half of the book upped the ante; during that time, I read for four hours straight and couldn’t put the book down. It refused to let me go. And the final chapter gave me just the closure that I needed, tying the book up nicely in a feel-good (if not a little cliched) ending.
I couldn’t get over how real the characters were; I’ve always thought that the mark of a good book is when its characters have the power to make you happy, to make you angry, to make you weep, and to make you relate to them. Water For Elephants did all of those things - whether it was August, the cruel animal trainer, making me seethe with anger, or Jacob and Marlena’s love affair that made my heart ache, or Rosie the elephant whose precocious behaviour always had me smiling.
All I can say is that the movie can’t possibly measure up to this book. There’s no way it’s possible, and I’m anticipating disappointment in the theatre. Because Water For Elephants was too good for words (and one of the stand-out books that I’ve read this year, by far).
The Borrowers - Mary Norton
In The Borrowers, Mrs. May, our narrator, tells Kate, her young charge, of the “borrowers,” Pod, Homily, and Arrietty Clock, a family of three that her younger brother came to know when he was ten years old and staying in his great aunt Sophy’s house. Arrietty, discontent with being kept in her family’s little house under the kitchen, insists that her father takes her with him on one of his borrowing trips upstairs, where she meets “the boy.” He and Arrietty forge a friendship that at first proves beneficial for the pint-sized family, but ultimately causes them to “emigrate” - or so we’re left to assume.
Out of all the children’s novels I’ve read this semester, The Borrowers has been the “toughest” read, but probably the best (barring Harry Potter, of course). The narration wasn’t overbearing and irritatingly didactic, nor was the main character, Arrietty, an overly caricatured version of children her age, as I’ve come to expect from novels directed to younger audiences. In that sense, it was a pleasant read.
I did find Homily, Arrietty’s mother, to be particularly grating though. There was never a happy moment for that woman unless she was acquiring new things for her tiny little home - whether it be trinkets from Aunt Sophy’s drawing room, or pretty dollhouse furniture from the attic, Homily was in her element when she was decorating (and redecorating) her modest home. If she wasn’t able to do that, she’d either be nagging her daughter (quite shrilly, I might add), or complaining about how she and Pod used to be rich before Arrietty was born. Homily was almost a little stereotypical of how Victorian women were portrayed (I’m under the impression that The Borrowers took place in this time period, anyway, so it’s not hard to make that leap in logic).
Regardless, I liked it. It’s a good, quick read, even for older audiences. It just wasn’t spectacular.
Very Valentine - Adriana Trigiani
Very Valentine follows Valentine Roncalli, a 33-year-old apprentice to her grandmother’s wedding shoe-making business, as she attempts to juggle a trying job, a hectic family life, and a romance with chronically busy and neglectful chef Roman Falconi. Given a plot summary similar to this, one could safely assume that it would be a fun and frivolous read, and could be filed away in the chick lit genre.
That would be a generous overstatement.
Valentine, a nauseating and overdramatic narrator, spent the majority of the novel making quips about her family, the stereotypical and dramatically caricatured version of a “normal” Italian clan, and was constantly referred to as “the funny one.” Despite this label, there was nothing she said that was remotely amusing; all of her comments regarding “what Italian people like” toed the line between good natured humour and hipster racism, and left me dissatisfied. I didn’t get to know a nuanced, interesting family; I just felt like I was reading about what everyone expects an Italian family to sound and act like. It was as if Trigiani was trying to cater to culturally assumed tropes, which ultimately did her a disservice. People are more three-dimensional than that.
What I found to be the most painful, glaring flaw was the sexist undertones of the story; there were entire segments in the novel on how men bettered with age, whereas women just aged - and that was portrayed as an unflattering process that all women should strive to hide for as long as possible. Valentine’s mom went a step further by insisting that to keep her husband’s affections from straying, she had to defy the aging process, and keep herself dressed up at all times - basically, at the age of 60, she was still acting like a sex kitten because she didn’t trust her husband enough to assume that he loved her based on her personality. Over and over again, this sentiment was repeated: if you want to keep your man, you better doll yourself up until the day you die because your personality will never be enough.
Frankly, I think men deserve a bit more credit than that. And so do women.
If the female characters weren’t telling each other to dress younger than their years and in other ways defy the aging process in order to keep their men hooked, they were blaming themselves for the faults of their partners - at the very least, Valentine did. Every time Roman deserted her, she would get mad for a little while and then inevitably find some way to turn the blame on herself. And when she came to her realization that they just weren’t meant to be, she didn’t blame him for his flakiness in the least; she rationalized it, by claiming that she, like Roman, wasn’t as invested in the relationship as she could have been; not once in the book did her narration back this assertion up.
To Trigiani’s credit, Valentine, though ridiculously whiny and childish, transcended the not-so-closet sexism and found that she didn’t quite fit the shoe she thought she would (oh, come on, I had to use a shoe metaphor at least once). Instead of straining to fit herself into Roman’s life, she chose to live her own (not before uttering some inane sentiment about Roman deserving to be put first, which she couldn’t do at this time in her life - forgetting, of course, that he’d never put her first during their entire relationship, and had actually ditched her in a foreign country).
Beyond that, the prose itself was riddled with misplaced and dangling modifiers, incorrect punctuation use, and an overabundance of flowery purple prose. There was much more telling than showing - for example, the narration was constantly saying that Roman was charming and wonderful, but his mannerisms rarely confirmed it - and the narration itself lost focus several times; I’d be in the middle of reading dialogue, and then find two paragraphs later that, at the slightest provocation, Valentine was off and rambling about some random, often irrelevant, memory or thought, and didn’t return to the point at hand until pages later. It was a jarring and unpleasant experience, to say the least.
Suffice it to say, I wouldn’t recommend the book. The only reason I actually finished it was so I could add it to my book total.
Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert
If you could spend a year in three different places (four months a piece), where would you go?
For Elizabeth Gilbert, a woman suffering depression and in the midst of a horrible divorce and toxic post-separation love affair, the answer was Italy, India, and Indonesia; the mission of her year-long trip was to experience pleasure, spirituality, and to learn how to balance both - one goal per destination. This true story chronicles Liz’s year-long journey of self-imposed “alone time” while she rediscovers who she is, and the key to achieving and maintaining happiness.
From the very first sentence, I was hooked. Gilbert’s brutally honest, clever, and funny narration kept me engaged in her story, and I never once wanted to put the book down. Her story was so inspiring, especially because she was able to overcome depression with minimal use of drugs and her own sheer will-power to pull herself out of it.
I don’t think I could have asked for a more emotionally available narrator; Gilbert was, as I mentioned before, willing to be brutally honest with her readers about her thoughts, feelings, strengths, and weaknesses, and it only benefitted her.
I would definitely recommend Eat, Pray, Love for its raw, powerful narrator and story, as well as the humour that Gilbert often inserts into her writing.
Oh, and, for the record, I’d spend the year in England, Germany, and China - certainly not for the food and spirituality; just to satisfy my interest in living in countries that I’ve always wanted to visit.
Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin
We all had, or currently have, that friend. You know the one. The one whose life seems to just naturally fall into place. She doesn’t have to try too hard at anything at all, because luck is always on her side. She’s a real winner. However, often this comes at the expense of your own self esteem - she may be a real lucky gal, but she lacks in the tact department. Every moment must be about her, and if it’s about you then she’ll find a way, subtly, to either make it less special for you, or to change the focus back to her. Let’s face it, here: she’s not really a friend. (And if you have never had a friend like this, chances are you were that friend.)
Welcome to the life of Rachel White, who often finds herself measuring her own life against her best friend Darcy’s, who is the type A winner. She went to a sub-par university, only to end up with a better job than Rachel; she’s the “pretty” one; and she’s a real attention hogger. Even on Rachel’s 30th birthday, where this story begins, Darcy manages to outshine her best friend.
However, tables are turned when, tipsy and a little loose, Rachel sleeps with Darcy’s fiance (and her own college buddy), Dexter.
Goody Two-shoes Rachel finds her life suddenly full of the romance and rule-breaking that she’s managed to avoid for a full thirty years, as she and Dex sneak around behind Darcy’s back in the months leading up to her best friend’s wedding.
As someone who has had that friend, Emily Giffin’s Something Borrowed was a satisfying and relatable read. As malicious and awful as the sentiment is, there’s something ridiculously appealing about seeing a character like Darcy have something taken from her by the underdog who truly deserved to be happy. The nature of the story is so alluring to those women (and I know there are many) who work their butts off only to find their glory and triumphs usurped by a friend who really isn’t much of a friend at all.
Though Something Borrowed is very much a chick-lit novel, it’s a great one and I’d definitely recommend it.
- Kelsey
In other news