Wednesday, February 9, 2011

No! I Don't Want to Join A Book Club by Virginia Ironside

This book started out really great but by the end I was bored. The main character Marie is eccentric but yet amusing. She is in love with her friend, Archie, from her teenage years, who is now a widower, and only realizes it around halfway through her sixtieth year.
She muses about him and flirts with him and it is charming. Her friend, Penny, is dating a much younger man she met on an internet dating site and it gets to the point of her having sex with him and then the dreaded no call back and she falls into a anxious state that is uncomfortable to read. Marie also discovers that she is strangely attracted to her gay friend’s partner both of whom she has known for ever and she counts as family and when he voices his attraction to her she starts to visualize a future with him.
It really starts out as a very good read, but once her grandson is born, she turns into this crazily fraught person who she insists throughout the story she is happy to be. Marie starts to have these ghastly thoughts about her grandson getting sick and even dying and it gets so bad that she starts to become this miserable obsessed grandmother. I found myself wanting to smack her or at the very least put the book down.
Marie’s manic moments near the end drove me nuts but overall the book was ok. The beginning was much better than the end.
2 Stars

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