Well, this went in a direction I really wasn't expecting. I'm not sure how I feel about it all, but it certainly taps into some largely unspoken feelings a lot of women have. I'm not sure what the author was trying to say about it though. ( )

Shelby works at the magazine Modern Love, is married, and has a new baby.

But none of her story ideas are getting accepted at the magazine. One day, she comes home from grocery shopping, and forgets to close the door door while getting things to the kitchen, and their dog gets out. He's hit by a truck and killed.

Shelby's misguided pitch of a story about Hallmark movies is the last straw that gets her fired, and the death of the dog convinces her husband and her mother that she can't be trust unsupervised with the baby. Her mother--"Mommy," to both her and her husband, which I found extremely off-putting (seriously, we get no hint that "Mommy" has any other name) moves in, and she and her son-in-law occasionally let Shelby hold the baby for a few minutes.

I can't imagine why she would find this frustrating, or have any difficulty bonding with the baby, can you? 🙄

Shelby watches her beloved Hallmark movies, and pretends to be submitting and selling stories freelance, and starts to get odd text messages, saying there's a way out of this rut, a way to fulfill some of her dreams.

Then she and her mother go to the store, and when she tries to pay, her card is declined, and the bank says the account doesn't even exist.

"Mommy" sounds completely paranoid when she says women are disappearing, and this kind of event often precedes the disappearance. Yet, it's not long before Shelby finds that the text messages were a trap, and she's been whisked away to a town called Heaven's Bottom, to be transformed from a failed woman, a "W2," into a real, proper W1, a woman who knows how to love.

And then Shelby slips very quickly into what sounds to me like Stockholm Syndrome. She's not actually achieving any change in the desired direction, but she is sure they're doing this for her own good.

And it trails off without any real ending that I could discern. Not recommended.

I received this audiobook as part of the Audible Originals program, and am reviewing it voluntarily. ( )

The Abductee's Tale
Review of the Amazon Original Kindle eBook (September 2020)

This was definitely the oddest of the Amazon Original Out of Line eBooks. A woman who is unsatisfied with her life and is lying about it to her family is abducted by a mysterious organization whose goal seems to be to get her to conform. I may be missing something here but I couldn't see how this was about "a woman stepping out of line and taking control of their own story."

Sweet virginia is one of seven Amazon Kindle eBooks released September 1, 2020 as part of their Amazon Original Out of Line collection of short stories about women taking control. ( )

Pandemic read courtesy of audible and amazon.