Review: more accurately, "She's a B*tch, but I Love Her"
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 20, 2013
I wanted to love Marital Bitch from page one. The characters all had quirks and potential, I could not wait to get to know them more. JC Emery takes on a fresh approach to true love, and I was excited to dive into this book. I could get past the spelling and grammatical errors because I enjoyed the dialogue and unique angle this story was taking.That said, my review will contain spoilers because the story and characters had significant issues...Depsite my desire to love the book, the heroine (Colleen) was completely unlikable. I am all for a strong willed heroine, but she was flat out mean and dishonest. For a Harvard educated lawyer, she is also down right ignorant when it came to her personal health. What self centered career obsessed woman completely forgets about birth control...for weeks? Then when showing every stereotypical sign of pregnancy, she acts ignorantly pounding coffee and junk food while not knowing if she is pregnant. She is not even considering taking another test for the health of the potential baby?!When Brad uses Vicky as a ploy to make Colleen jealous, it was mind boggling how those scenes were written. Colleen's reactions were bizarre, and Brad's anger towards her being jealous was equally so (her jealousy was the whole reason he was pretending to be involved with Vicky). It created a tension, and not the good kind to build a climax in the story. Ultimately, Vicky and that nonsense of a storyline go completely unaddressed and hang out there unresolved between Brad and Colleen.The backstory with Heather threw a complete wrench in my ability to find any redemption in Colleen. It was both unbelievable, and unforgivable. An unnecessary addition to the story that only made "why the hell would he want this woman?" a constant question.Finally, I appreciate the "real" aspects of true life and true love JC Emery integrates into the story. A few fart jokes are funny, but it gets overdone. The same with hanging bellies, bad breath, and all the things people escape from in a good book. With the insistence on playing up potty humor to bring a relatable reality, actions like Colleen's quitting her job with hundreds of thousands in debt racked up left gaping holes in the story.I like the author's writing style and the dialogue, which takes me back to my opening comment that I wanted to love this book. However, the heroine is completely unlikable and her personal development in the story was forced because her actions were consistently horrendous. We get it...she bit people and took from Brad since she was a baby. She has always been a terror and self centered. But since this is under the guise of a love story, we need to find something about her to like so we can root for them to be together. This is all that lead me to believe that the title would be more accurately "She's a B*tch, but I Love Her."