The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
This is my third Joshilyn Jackson title and I am still thoroughly in love with her writing style and southern sensibilities. Just when I thought I could predict where she was going with the plot, she threw a curve ball at me and surprised me to no end. It’s hard for me to find more descriptive words to talk about this book other than to say that I love it and highly recommend it. There are 2 more titles in the JJ collection and I plan to read those by the end of the year.
The Secret Between Us
I am not particularly fond of books that start with the main character committing to a lie. Every parent wants to protect their child, but some lies are not helpful to anyone. I couldn’t get behind the lie that the character was telling and that kept me from liking her as a character. Not being able to like her made me see fault with other decisions she was making along the way. Was that the point? Does it help the story line to have the reader doubt and dislike the main character immediately?
Broken
I think this book would have been much more enjoyable had I read it and not listened to it. It took me a while to get into the book because the narrator reads at a very fast pace. It’s almost as if she is uncomfortable with the words so she reads them as fast as possible. Outside of this, she makes her twenty something characters sound like teenagers and I still think its creepy to read/listen to scenes of kids having sex. With that aside, the book is fantastic. Megan did a great job laying out this book and storyline. Now, because this book is clearly erotica, it is not recommended for everyone but it is a nice glimpse into how some married people relate to their single friends. And when the single people in your life don’t have juicy enough stories, it is nice to fantasize about a chance encounter with a stranger that has amazing stories to tell.
The Husband Habit
I enjoyed this book in the beginning. The character was likable and I sympathized with her dating woes. But then she goes to her mother’s house and her internal dialogue becomes downright mean and bitchy. I am not a fan of the insults that get lobbed at people you don’t know. A pick-up truck with a yellow magnetic ribbon does not mean the driver is a country, gun-totting hick. That’s the kind of crap that starts to come from the main character when, in the previous chapter, she left the mean talk to her sidekick. And while I am not a fan of war, I don’t appreciate the author trying to make anyone that willingly enrolls in the military out to be war-mongering idiots. The love interested becomes a truly good man only after denouncing the tenants of military. This is irritating and just gave me another reason not to like the main character as she constantly made disparaging jokes towards the soldiers who are doing their jobs. I really wanted to stop listening to this book, but I finished it because the love interest was likable. Its just too bad he couldn’t be given a better woman. I’m also getting a little sick of the trope that perpetuates the notion that the man that is for us will be secretly rich and will step forward to make our dreams come true. The story was good and not completely predictable, but the characters are not likable and the political ideologies wrapped into the story line are infuriating. I can half heartedly recommend this title.
Ask For It
I probably listened to this book at the wrong time. I got bored half way through the book, but I don’t want that to reflect on what I think of the subject matter itself. Books like this are incredibly helpful for women navigating both at home and at work. I would like to be able to say we women have really turned things around but we do have a long way to go still. We do typically have trouble negotiating and knowing our worth. I have gotten better at this myself, but I still too have trouble demanding better treatment at home and at work. This book was a reminder that I can’t let things slip. I have to get back on track with asking for what I need and for what I deserve. This book doesn’t really give concrete steps to take but it gives plenty of examples and tools to use. This is a valuable resource to revisit from time to time.
Friends and Lovers
This is a re-read for me. I discovered Eric Dickey in college. This was the first title that I read and I remember enjoying it. I still have a couple of his books unread on my shelf but I wanted to revisit the first before I moved on to the next. The older me is nothing like the younger me that I was. While I enjoyed the story line, this style of character writing reminded me of all the things I actively chose not to have in my life. Lives are full of drama and some of us seem to attract it more than others. I like life on the calmer side of things and I shy away from people that live their life with an excess of trouble. This makes me second guess reading any more Eric Dickey titles but I’m going to try to give them a chance. Maybe his characters grew up like I did and will be more appealing in later writing. We’ll see.
Outliers
Interesting, but nothing but pop fluff. You can take any set of data and get the answer that you want. Everyone wants a mystical reason for success or failure and when they can’t find anything unique about you, they put together random circumstances that seem to work together for a little bit of serendipity. I don’t know if this was supposed to be a motivating title as it fails at that so I’m going to consider this a coffee table book of trivia. There is no science involved. And just to illustrate how non-inspirational this book is, it points out that “you cannot escape the limitations of your generation.” Doesn’t that make you feel great?! I try not to read any reviews of books before I finish the book and write my own review-especially for a popular book. After putting down my initial thoughts, I took a look at what other over on Goodreads thought about this book. Many of them agreed with my assessment. This just further concretes the fact that we should not choose the books we read based on marketing or popularity. I bought this book years ago, but I did so because it was the talk of the time. Too bad I have this as an audible title. I would quickly take this to trade it in. But I do have to say that his conclusion wraps everything up nicely and says exactly what you should get from this book…”An outlier is not an outlier at all”.
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