Beth HarbisonReseñas
Autor de Adictas a los zapatos
Reseñas
When in Doubt, Add Butter por Beth Harbison
The premise, that a 38-year-old workoholic wakes up and finds herself 18 again, was really intriguing and a fascinating scenario to think about; however, I wasn't particularly fond of how it was pulled off. The end chapters explained it well enough, though it still felt a little unexpected--NAME hadn't mentioned having any spiritual beliefs or such that would have led to the epilogue.
I did enjoy the scenarios that NAME was put into and the way she dealt with them, being literally an adult in a teenager's body with the outside world having different expectations of her and the way she should act.
This book definitely made me feel old, even at 20, and made me wonder if I'm truly living life the way that makes me happy, which wasn't always a good feeling. If I were older, this might have almost been depressing to read. But the overall message was positive and optimistic.
Overall, though this isn't something I'd go out of my way to recommend, this was a solid book that held my attention.
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
The older sister, Crosby, is the daring one and has honed a mystery story starting from childhood and it became a best seller.
A page turner, family story with two wonderful parents thrown in, I wondered at the beginning if I could finish it. It seemed too light and fluffy but them, a few serious turns made it into a better story. Because of its page turning quality it would make a great beach read or a gift for a friend to read in the hospital.
I have ADHD and I was dismayed at the portrayal of has been movie star who made it big when she was a teen. I thought that her ADD was overdone. I wondered if someone could be that distracted all the time. Either I am in better shape than typical or the actress is not typical. I will let other readers decide.
I did like the way that the sisters were portrayed, but I have had a sister. so you tell me if the relationship was painted realistically.
I love reading about food, so, when I saw The Cookbook Club and read it was about three women becoming friends, I jumped on it. Female friendship and food? It’s kind of a match made in heaven for me. I was also really curious to see how long Aja could hide her pregnancy. In some ways, this book was what I expected it might be, but, in other ways, it was very different and I’m stuck feeling a little indifferent even though my heart really wants to love this book.
The Plot: More of a Sweet Romance
It’s an ordinary day for housewife Margo, who loves to cook and make YouTube videos of healthy recipes for her parents and their senior citizen community, until her husband walks in and announces he’s moving across the country without her. Stuck with no idea how to support herself, and with her ex-husband’s late grandparents’ dilapidated farm house, she signs up for a new cookbook club, hoping to put her numerous cookbooks to good use. And she had the book.
Trista was a lawyer, but now runs a crumbling bar/restaurant. Desperate to turn things around, she starts a cookbook club to try out new recipes. Only Margo and a young woman called Aja show up, but the three become quick friends. They support each other as Trista’s business struggles, Margo deals with an old crush who is now renovating the dilapidated farm house, and Aja wonders how long she can hide her pregnancy from her wealthy boyfriend and his snobby mother.
I loved the idea of three women forming a cookbook club and trying out new recipes. Female friendship is the one thing I look for in women’s fiction, so I loved that this book involved three very different women somehow coming together and becoming friends. But it also branches out so each woman’s story is told. I liked that the reader gets to know each woman, her history, and what she’s trying to do with her life. It was fun seeing them interact, but, unfortunately, the story kept them apart most of the time.
As much as I wanted to love this story, there were several things that disappointed me. For one, the actually cookbook club was barely seen. There were some meetings, but most them came in the form of snippets at the end of each part. Most of the story was focused on Margo, which makes sense if this goes on to be a series, especially since there are men in Trista’s and Aja’s lives, but only Margo’s love interest gets his own chapters, making the rest of them feel irrelevant. Instead of feeling like women’s fiction, much less a cookbook club, it felt like a romance where the heroine just happens to have a couple of new friends to make the story longer. The story also moved way too fast. The chapters were short, the ending sudden, making me wonder if the whole purpose of the book was to just talk about food, because there’s an awful lot of food in such a fast story.
The Characters: Three Women, Plus a Few Men
As disappointing as the story was, I did really like the characters. Most of them are in their late twenties to early thirties, so it was a little easier for me to identify with them. They were a lot fun and they each had their moments that made them feel human, but there ended up being some thin threads that wound them together that felt a little weak. Each woman was able to stand on her own, perhaps a little too much, because their reliance on each other felt more like token gestures than a genuine need for female support.
I loved all of the women. My favorite, though, was Margo. I identified the most with her, especially since she married in her early twenties just like I did, and sometimes those “what if” thoughts are hard to dispel. I loved her enthusiasm for food and cooking, and can’t help but admire the well-stocked kitchen she has. It’s kind of my dream kitchen. I really liked Aja, too. She’s younger, so came off as more innocent, though she managed to get herself into an interesting pickle as she tried to develop her voice and let her needs and wants be known. I loved that her arc wasn’t so focused on romance, but on a young woman finding her own feet. Then there’s Trista, who was a lot of fun and enthusiastic. She made some rather interesting choices throughout the book, but it made her feel like one of those overly enthusiastic humans who rush headlong into things and hope for the best. And then there’s Lucinda, an older woman Aja comes to know, who was utterly fascinating and had a rich, deep history.
I’d like to say I liked the guys in the story, too, but we only really get to know one: Margo’s love interest, Max. He had an interesting story, but so much of his life in the story was taken up with mooning over Margo that it made him feel one dimensional and not as interesting as I would have expected. There are also a couple of guys in Trista’s life. It felt like they were building up to something, and then the book just ended. They seemed nice, but, as a reader, I felt like I was being held at a distance from them.
The Setting: Washington, D.C-ish
Most of The Cookbook Club is set in the Washington, D. C. area, but, by the end of the book, I’d completely forgotten. There was a strong suburban feel to it, a bit of a rural feel since the old farm house was extremely isolated, and no real big city feel to it. I don’t actually recall any landmarks of D. C. making their way into the story. I got the feeling where the story takes place was irrelevant and had enough of a mix to make the story make sense.
Overall: Cute, but Little Substance
The Cookbook Club is cute and has a wonderful idea behind it, but there was almost too much food and not enough substance. I liked that Margo, Trista, and Aja each had their own problems and were occasionally dependent on each other, but everything was just too easily solved for them so there was almost no tension in the story. It all felt almost storybook perfect. There were also some inconsistencies, little details that changed that made the story a little jarring. This story sounded so good and extremely delicious, but it disappointed in how easily everything happened, how rushed the ending was, and how it felt like the first in a series without touting itself as such.
Thank you to Netgalley and William Morrow Paperbacks for a free e-copy. All opinions expressed are my own.
Hope in a Jar starts out with a bang just like all of Harbison's books do. The difference with Hope in a Jar is that the book just keeps getting better and better.
The plot of the mysterious death of friendship between best friends, the too-good-to-be-true guy friend, and the rivalry between classmates which reignites at a 20 year high school reunion is handled well by Harbison.
The parallel plot lines between the past and the present work well and increase tension. All of the characters are well-drawn and real, even the "evil" Vickie who sees herself as a victim.
I can't praise this book enough. I stayed up very late last night to finish it.
I'm glad I picked this up, and if you're a fan of chick-lit, you'll be glad you picked it up too!
Surprisingly the best read I've had this summer!
A friend of mine gave this book to me because she thought it was cute and she thoroughly enjoyed it. I, on the other hand, did not enjoy it at all.
During a Christmas Eve snowstorm, Noelle finds herself locked inside the high-end department store for which she works. It is a dream come true! While looking forward to a night of luxurious sleeping accommodations, gourmet foods, and round the clock shopping, Noelle is rudely interrupted by her guardian angel, Charlie—an aggravatingly smug old woman who says “Zooterkins” at regular intervals. Over the course of the night, Charlie prompts Noelle to remember decisions she made in her past; Charlie then reveals the alternate scenarios for what would have happened if Noelle had only made the “right” decisions. All of these “right” scenarios center on Noelle eventually getting asked out on a date by her childhood classmate, Jacob Marsden. Christmas Eve culminates with Noelle finally learning her lesson and making the “right” decision to go to Italy with her friend, Lorna, on a buying trip…with the inevitable results.
Noelle is a successful woman who has friends, a job she loves, and a life she is reasonably happy with. In fact, despite the standard heartbreaks and regrets most human beings share, she is pretty content; until her guardian angel comes along and browbeats her with just how miserable and pathetic she really is. And her guardian angel is bound and determined not to quit harassing Noelle until poor, silly Noelle realizes just how big of a failure she is…without a man. The angel even quotes a parable that equates Noelle’s inability to snag a man with a stubborn man’s death by drowning. But, never fear, the guardian angel is administering CPR by giving Noelle one last chance to fix her broken life by shoving Jacob Marsden into the picture once more. Zooterkins.
Does anyone’s idea of a guardian angel really tally with this old buttinsky? I certainly hope not.
And Jacob Marsden himself is no dreamboat. His pushy demeanor and constant reappearance in the angel-corrected version of Noelle’s life make it genuinely seem as if he is supernaturally stalking her. It’s both creepy and unsettling.
Readers who are inclined to exaggeratedly twee sentimentality and who enjoy a corny bit of romance will probably eat this book up over the holidays. For readers like me who are sick to death of reading about women who have to be attached to men to have meaningful lives, this book is about as agonizingly painful as being caught in a beartrap.
There are actually two blurbs regarding this book on GoodReads and I kind of wish that the other blurb were the real one but I live in a lovely fantasy world where I have powers. This is one of those books where nothing happens, nothing happens and then bam, a lot happens and the author didn't appear to have time to wrap it all up so parts of the last 30% of the book seemed rushed to me. I remember glancing at the percentage thinking, that's all that's left? There's so much to do!
Willa decides to go to the beach house she owns with her late husband. She hasn't been there since he died in the house three years ago, leaving her and their son Jamie to find their new normal and learn how to cope. There's a couple of chapters of flashbacks to shortly after Ben died that seemed unnecessary to the plot to me but I think it was more about character development. Jamie and Willa don't have the best relationship. Willa hates his girlfriend (so do I) and nags him all the time. Jamie is a teenager and really just wants to be left alone. They both are grieving in their own way but their communication suuuucks.
Most of the book was Willa getting the house ready to sell and talking to Ben's ghost. Right, so there's a ghost. Ben keeps showing up to talk to Willa and everyone else thinks she's a lunatic as they keep catching her talking to herself. Through conversations with Ben, Willa begins to grieve and starts being more present to the people in her life, including Jamie and her BFF Kristen, who comes to stay at the beach house with them to help prep it for sale. Kristen brings her daughter Kelsey who is the same age as Jamie. We see the two of them rekindle their friendship from when they were kids while we are watching Willa grieve.
While I thought the book was a good look at grief and loss, I found it underwhelming when it came to the other plot points. There were too many things that seemed rushed, especially towards the end. I was left with a lot of questions, which is normal for women's fiction, and why I don't read a lot of it. I need my HEAs dangit.
Overall, While You Were Gone is a good character study and look at the grieving process. I give the book a solid 3 out of 5 stars. It wasn't bad, it wasn't amazing.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advance copy of the story.
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