Review and G!ve@way: Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon

Title: Wife 22
Author: Melanie Gideon
Format: ARC
Publisher: Random House
Publish Date: May 29, 2012 (Today!)
Source: I received a copy from the PR. This did not affect my review.

Why You're Reading This Book:

• You like contemporary fiction.
• You like witty writing.
• You're looking for a book that has a little bit of a lesson.

What's the Story?:

For fans of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It comes an irresistible novel of a woman losing herself . . . and finding herself again . . . in the middle of her life.

When Alice Buckle, who has been married to William for nearly twenty years, receives a survey in her e-mail from the Netherfield Center for the Study of Marital Happiness, she is in the doldrums. She loves her husband but they've grown distant, she is bored with her job, and her adolescent children need her less now. And she has reached the age at which her mother died. So as she idly begins answering the questions, she finds herself baring her soul in an anonymous survey she never even intended to respond to. As she struggles, she realizes it has been years since anyone asked deep, serious questions of her, and really listened to her answers. Soon her entire life as she knows it is called into question.

My Two Cents:

I loved this book a lot. This was the first book that I had read by Melanie Gideon but I think I will be reading more by her in the future. The writing is really funny (a book that can make me laugh out loud is a good one in my book) and witty. Gideon also gets you really attached to the characters. I loved the main character, Alice. She's really a full character and one that you feel could be in your own life.

I also really like how the book was interspersed with Alice's answers to the question, the Facebook posts, and the Google searches. All of these things give you more detail about all of the various characters in the book, which was really cool. It was a really interesting device to give you a flavor of who the characters are and what they're thinking about.

This book is geared for people a little bit older than I am; Alice and her husband have been married for 20 years. I've been married for two years. Yet, I think there's a lot that I took away from the book. Aside from being funny, the book has a good message, which is that you shouldn't take your loved ones for granted. I could see how easy that might be to do. You always think that you're going to have that person around so it's easy to just see them as something ordinary rather than really special. It's easy to forget that relationships need care and keeping just as we humans do. Relationships are work but if you're willing to put in the time, you can have something really magical. It takes a long time for Alice to realize this but she does eventually.

I will admit that I did see the major twist (I won't tell you all what it was because you all just really need to read this book) towards the end but because I wanted it to happen so badly, I was not sad at all that I had guessed what was going to happen.

Bottom line: This is another good summer read!

 
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