Tina Reads All the Books

Author: Jennifer Weiner

Rating: 2/5 stars

Book Blurb: Daisy Shoemaker can’t sleep. With a thriving cooking business, full schedule of volunteer work, and a beautiful home in the Philadelphia suburbs, she should be content. But her teenage daughter can be a handful, her husband can be distant, her work can feel trivial, and she has lots of acquaintances, but no real friends. Still, Daisy knows she’s got it good. So why is she up all night?

While Daisy tries to identify the root of her dissatisfaction, she’s also receiving misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. While Daisy’s driving carpools, Diana is chairing meetings. While Daisy’s making dinner, Diana’s making plans to reorganize corporations. Diana’s glamorous, sophisticated, single-lady life is miles away from Daisy’s simpler existence. When an apology leads to an invitation, the two women meet and become friends. But, as they get closer, we learn that their connection was not completely accidental. Who IS this other woman, and what does she want with Daisy?

Well, we started this one off with a doozy. Trigger warnings for sexual assault and rape should have been somewhere, anywhere on this book. The blurb failed. This book looks like a light beach read. IT. IS. NOT. The rape is a focal point of the book, as is the aftermath. It also was too long, just way too long for what the book wanted to say. At one point I wanted to DNF it, but I had paid for it and I wanted to review it. Next time? I will put it down and move on, cuz it left me feeling so awful and triggered and I didn’t appreciate it.

The pros of this book is that it felt authentic when it came to the subject matter, and I did like the actual writing. But the misleading advertising? Nope. On Goodreads, all the reviews are basically the same – many versions of ‘this is NOT the book I thought it was’. Which makes me wonder – why? Why did they choose to market it like this? Oh well, on to the next book…