Review: Fun but too much focus on only one thing
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 27, 2012
I came up against some problems when getting into this book. The first and foremost was how utterly incapable I was of relating to the protagonist. She's very materialistic, to say the least. Personally I have absolutely no interest in expensive clothes brands so reading about a character that is focused on such things is not always easy. She also felt very shallow, especially when at the very beginning her boyfriend is giving a speech and she's thinking at him to hurry up and finish so they can go home and have sex. Maybe it's just that I'm coming from a very different humour background, but that just didn't work for me and it placed a wedge between me and the character.When she loses her boyfriend and her job in one day, Leslee decides to move back to her hometown. Once there she mopes around on her best friend's sofa for a couple of months before she's forced to start pulling herself together. The story only actually focuses on her obsession with getting her romantic life back on track. There is no interest in her professional life. In fact, it gets completely ignored until towards the end she goes for one job and gets it immediately with no problems. There wasn't enough balance here for me, especially as she admits that she only has $400 in her account when she arrives (and somehow manages to pay for endless taxi rides). I needed to see more of her worrying about her finances and her professional standing, and not just her attempts to secure herself a new man.Her dating experiment was an original idea. I didn't really feel that the basic idea was really worked on. The idea was to go on a series of dates, employing different techniques on each to try to find out what a man wants from a woman. Well, she did go on a series of dates and most of them led to some laugh out loud moments, but it didn't feel like she was actually trying to do things differently each time. It was more like she reacted on instinct a lot of the time.She roped in a friend to help her with this. Unfortunately I felt that this showed just how shallow she was. The only time she really showed any interest in this friend, Annie, was when she needed something from her to do with this BACHELORETTE project. As soon as she dropped the experiment, she dropped the friend as well and, at the end, admits to not having seen her in months. I did rather like Annie, though. She was more grounded in a group of other characters that were just weird at times (even if that weirdness did lead to laughs at times).I also felt that Eric was not really given enough attention. I didn't feel the relationship between them growing. There were some interactions between them and then a couple of hints at his interest in her, her potential interest in him... and then she got drunk and things get physical. This would have been a great opportunity to work on growing Eric's character but instead he disappears and Leslee starts going on a few dates with someone else. I wanted to get to know Eric better. From the synopsis, I expected there to be more focus on him and her fighting her feelings for him.The book wasn't in anyway bad. It was a well-imagined plot that's not really anything new in the chick lit genre but entertaining in its own right. I simply felt that the book focused on too much on certain things that were not as necessary and didn't give enough time of day to other things that needed to be developed more.