Call me Irresistible by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

I am on a Susan Elizabeth Phillips binge. The last three books I read to completion have been by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. I think I am now firmly apart of the SEP fan base

Call Me Irresistible is about a young woman, Meg Koranda, who convinces her best friend, Lucy Jorik, to ditch the perfect man, Ted Beaudine at the alter. Lucy complies, and Meg is left ditched without money in the small town of Wynette Texas and forced to work her as a maid to cover a hotel bill she was unable to pay. The town hates her for the canceled wedding, but he manages to move from humiliating situation to humiliating situation with enough grace to earn the respect of the small town.

There were a few other subplots that kept the book moving forward. The town was in need a large construction project, a new golf course, and Ted had to court a business man to convince him to build there. The business man was a older rich man who took an interest in Meg because of her famous parents. The business mans daughter took an interest in Ted. There were some awkward dinner dates with the four of them of which Ted and Meg had to string them along both professionally and personally while Ted and Meg were falling in love. The business man really creeped out Meg for obvious reasons, and Ted ending up having to beat him up in a scene that acted as the climax of the book.

{spoiler}

In the end, Ted falls in love with Meg after a period of casual rebound lovemaking, and they decide to marry. There was a pronounced declaration of love first, of course.

Meg Koranda was the daughter of Jake Koranda and Fleur Savagar from another SEP book, Glitter baby, which I found interesting. Apparently a few of the other side characters had other SEP novels of their own, and were given weight like I should have recognized them.

There were a few parts of the book that really bewildered me. I knew when I picked up the book that Meg and Ted would end up together, but it didn’t play out like for the first 150 pages of the book. I was actually looking forward to seeing how the author was going to pull that out because they were almost mortal enemies through the first act. The answer was unconvincing. They ended up their casual lovemaking arrangement after an accidental kiss that neither character could explain. Its almost like they knew that they had to fall in love, and they decided to start falling in love just because that’s the thing that comes next. It wasn’t natural, and the romance didn’t have any context to it. Ted was awful to her, and Meg was acidic in response. He wasn’t awful in an aloof bad boy way either. He was contradictory and mean spirited.

Another part that lost me was Lucy’s blessing. Right before Meg and Ted hooked up, Meg called Lucy to ask for her permission first. Lucy was forthcoming and in approval. Sure, the book would have been a lot more interesting if Lucy said no, but the plot was already too convoluted and too absent of Lucy to add that dimension to her character.

The whole “Win a Date with Ted” thing I found completely extra and unnecessary.  It didn’t add any scenes in the book, nothing to their journey, and acted as a false climax to an already eventful plot line. Sure it added tension, but all it did was put the tension in the wrong place. You expected Meg and Ted to have a fantastic reunion in San Francisco and fall in love again, and when it doesn’t end up that way, their love story loses all steam. I mean, the “Win a Date with Ted” contest was hinted at throughout almost the entire book. It was foreshadowed like crazy. Then it fell flat. When they actually meet up again in New York City 20-30 pages later, it feels like too little too late.  I know SEP is trying to avoid rom-com cliques but c’mon. If she was going to go that route, she should have taken a red pen through the entire story line.

The plot with Haley breaking into her house and terrorizing her house could have been edited out as well.

The last and most troubling aspect of the book was the conflict in Meg and Teds relationship. Meg found him too robotic, too practical. Her chief complaint was that his lovemaking was too analytical. He was a systematic lover and she found him to be not compulsive enough. She wanted him to be lost in the lovemaking, drunk with her sex. In the end, the lovemaking that satisfied her seemed a little rape-y. I found the narrative of the book didn’t articulate this frustration well, and in the end, sounded immature. She sounded like someone who had the perfect relationship but had to find something to gripe about because, well, she gripes about everything.

Despite my minor complaints, I really enjoyed the book. I love reading about gallent acts of social valor, rough men sticking up for their women, and fabulous country clubs to boot. Sure, the book could streamlined the plot a little, but the reading experience was worth it. Only in books like these can such lazy layabouts land such perfect men.

101 things to do before you Diet by Mimi Spencer.

The full title of this book is 101 things to do before you diet because looking great isn’t just about losing weight.

I picked up this book expecting a list of things that would deemphasize weight loss. You know what I mean. The title says that looking great isn’t about losing weight. So naturally, I thought the book would not be about losing weight and about loving the skin you are in. I was wrong. The book was absolutely about losing weight in everyway. It wasn’t about feeling good in your own skin, it was about the path of least resistance towards looking, feeling, and eventually being thinner.

Quite a few of the 101 things were just style tips to distract you from hating yourself. They were also awfully specific. Tips like blow dry your hair, wear heels, and wear opaque black panty hose were on the list. These are not tips that people need when they are told to find their own style and love the unique and wonderful person they are. These are the tips that are told when someone thinks that there is a uniform right and wrong for everyone. The right, of course, being skinny, and the wrong, of course, being happy for the person you are without changing a single thing.

The whole chapter two was about how to eat. I skipped a lot of this section. The author talked blood sugar, hormone levels, the importance of breakfast, and eating healthy food. For a self proclaimed not-diet book, this section was all about how to change eating habits to specifically lose weight. There was nothing about eating great to feel great, it was about eating great to lose weight. This chapter made this book a diet book. The only reason they couldn’t call this a diet book proper was because this chapter was extremely ill informed. She off handedly mentioned that one could try the raw food diet as a tip. You would need supplements, maybe, the author doesn’t know.  After reading that, I felt like I could take these tips with a grain of salt.

There was another chapter on exercise. I felt like I had to skim this section as well. She didn’t talk about exercise for fun, happiness, and new life experiences. She broke exercise down into calories. Truthfully, people that think about exercise in a healthy way do not do that. Sad joggers think about calories, not happy ones. This chapter also made me think that this not-diet book was actually quite thinly veiled.

The author is very obviously a magazine contributor. She obsesses about weight, beauty, and glamour in her own life and these insecurities are evident on every page of this book. She skims across useless tips and over the surface of deep topics at the same depth as, well, a magazine would. I’d say to get equally good content, you should pick up an issue of Cosmopoltion or Redbook. At least there would be pictures.

What I did for Love by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

I was looking for something specific  while browsing through my local library romance rack. I wanted something with a wedding about young star crossed millionaires. I didn’t want the book to be about Christmas, and I didn’t want it to be about cowboys. I wanted something about celebrity and glamour. This book fit the bill.

The book is about a former sitcom actress and recent divorcee Georgie York. She is tore up about how her handsome actor husband, Lance, left her for a more glamorous actress. Bram Shepard costarred with Georgie back in the good ‘ol days but has since been ruined professionally by his own debaucherous nature. Georgie has lingering resentment about how his bad behavior led to the canceling of their show. He also callously played with her emotions in an unforgivable deflowering episode in their youth. One deus ex machine later they find themselves married the morning after a possibly drugging incident in Las Vegas. They decide to stay married because of paparazzi hounding and bad press. They decided one year of marriage would not look suspicious, and Georgie offered to pay Bram for his involvement. Hate and repulsion turn into respect, respect turns into lust, lust leads to sex, and after a second deus ex machine involving a SARS quarantine with ex-husband Lance and new wife, sex, professional development, and standing up to ones ex husband turned into love.

The description of Georgie matched a young Julia Roberts but the incident with her ex husband sounded overly similar to the Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie love triangle. The description of Bram matched Chase from Gossip Girl. The character descriptions relating to famous people felt a bit thin actually.

 I really enjoyed the book. The character description was sufficiently glamorous, and I ate up every word. It wasn’t as glamorous as Adored by Tilly Bagshawe, but the wealth and celebrity were juicy.

The writing was very good. The book flowed with character consistency and descriptive scenes. This wasn’t like the awkward scenes and hand motions evidenced in The Princess Bride. Sure, I had a feeling that the author might have watched the Great Gatsby before writing the quarantine scene, but there is nothing wrong with having modern influences. It was sort of topical, like these characters live in a world much similar to my own.

My only qualm about the writing is that it seemed like the only thing that moved the plot forward were these little improbable setups. It is much easier to make characters confront their problems when they are forced to be in a room together for whatever reason. Sure, this story could not present the conflicted feelings about falling in love with someone you are already married to like Georgie and Bram finding themselves married after a morning after.  I forgave the first time. The second plot device with the quarantine was paper thin.

The sex was descriptive, copious, and non-repetitive. Repetition is a problem these romance novels seem to have. People can only draw on their own experiences for things like this, so it makes sense that people fixate on different part of the experience. Like, in the princess bride, it was so breast centric that every instance of sex was almost the same. That was not a problem here. Sure, there was a lot of opening-her-thighs, but on the most part, it didn’t seem like a copy paste of the previous incident.

There were three weddings in this book. The first occurred off stage ala Britney in Vegas. The second occurred for the press in a Great Gatsby inspired 1920’s cathedral. The third in the final pages was the only “real” marriage with just a friend and a few family members. The third was probably the wedding ceremony implied by the cover. I am glad they included that because after reading the part about the vegas wedding, I felt like I was being deceived by the cover ala The Princess Bride.

Near the middle of the book when the characters start to have sex and regularly share their marriage bed, I realized that they should just stay married. But the characters really wanted to split up, and I had no idea why they would do that. They were in a monogamous relationship where they help eachother with their careers! It couldn’t really get better than that. I suppose that is why people write fiction about these sorts of things, so you can get personally invested in a strange situation. That is also probably a credit to the author, to manipulate my feelings this way.

Overall, I recommend this book if you want to take a break from serious literature and indulge in a delightful confection of a book.

Marry him: The case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough by Lori Gottlieb

This nonfiction is about sucking up your pride and lowering your standards about men or you will end up alone, sad, and regretful like the author. Lori Gottlieb offers herself up like she is the biggest nightmare you could imagine. She is the 41 year old single mother  (who in every other respect, has it all). The book picks apart her dating life with the kind of concise pessimistic eye that could only be had in hindsight. She begs the reader not to make her mistakes. She goes in through detail about what those mistakes are, how easy it is to make those mistakes, and how many of her friends have already made them.

I found the content repetitive and the book too long. I think I might have sufficed with the original Atlantic Article that this book sprung from.

It probably didn’t help that I have heard all of this before from my mom. All throughout my life she has said things like, “ [imagine a filipino accent] If you do not find someone to marry, you will be all alone”. And, my mom trying to tell me to act before my ship has sailed, “You better watch out because if you wait too long, the ship will leave you and you will be all alone”. The book went on and on and on. I relived the 20 years my mom preached that any man that does not hit you is worth marrying. The book felt that long. It also didn’t help that a lot of the story was about her friends as well. It felt gossipy, and at the very least, not very scientifically rigorous.

My biggest criticism for the book is that she never really defines her audience. She assumes every woman has the resources to live and work alone and raise a child alone. While she says that she is struggling financially, the fact that she is able to do it at all indicates that she has done well for herself.  Not every woman risks being overeducated, and at the risk for never settling for a man because they forgot they needed one. Gottlieb doesn’t realize it, but she is only speaking to a very well off class of women. She is speaking to the class of women that have the capability of making a choice. In fact the other side of the coin is far more scary. There are lots and lots of women out there that are in physically and emotionally abusive relationships that don’t have the social and economic resources to get out of them. Some women aren’t educated enough to know that they deserve better. She isn’t talking to them, she is talking to well off women like herself.

But it is implied. She tells us to throw a few more dates to the shorter and sweeter men of the world instead of spending that type looking for unicorns. I just wished that she offset some of the time she was telling us that we are far more unattractive than we think we are to explain that there are some universal dealbreakers that we shouldn’t settle for.

She didn’t say however, that you shouldn’t wait for someone you love. She just says that love might be different than you think it is. She likens (what she thinks is) western love to the practice of arranged marriages. Love is something that grows when two people have committed to eachother. That is something she learned from her Indian friend.

I don’t regret that I read this book. I found it convincing, and frankly, just because of the part of my life I am in, the message was something I needed to hear. I just know I should take it with a grain of salt. The author has legitimate regrets that she overassumes that we will have. I am a pragmatic person and I have never had the fairy tale fantasies that she assumes every woman has. As a matter of fact, I think the life she lives doesn’t sound so bad at all. She is a glamorous well educated female author with a son living in the big city. The whole basis of her book is based on a fear, and maybe, just maybe, its not really something to be all that afraid of. 

The Princess Bride By Diane Palmer

This book is misleading. When I picked up this book, I made two assumptions. The first was the unlikely chance that this was the book version of the popular movie staring Indigo Montoya.  This is the assumption that all the Barnes and Nobles reviewers had, giving this book a lofty 4 stars. The second assumption was that the book was about a princess. That is also incorrect. 

I also felt mislead by the first sentence

“Tiffany saw him in the distance, riding the big black stallion that already killed one man”

The book was also notably not about the horse, who was never mentioned again.  The book cover was misleading in a less nefarious way. The main character has long black hair, not short, and wore a prim white suit to her wedding, not a dress.

The book WAS, however, about a virgin whose husband married her just to get into her pants.  The ex girlfriend gets in the way a bit.  The male lead was named King, which might explain the title of this book.

Before we really get started picking this book apart, let me say that I can not recommend this book. The story lacks in every way.  It fails in  the juicy romance novel criteria with its lack of juicy sex, romantic love, dream weddings, and unattainable glamour. It also fails in the more expected traditional metrics with its lack of character development, scene description, and story arc.

Most of the drama comes after the sex. After he gets what he wants, they find that they don’t know eachother and feel uncomfortable talking to one another. It is the worst marriage I’ve ever read about. By the time I get to the final stretch in the last few pages, I realize how ridiculously addicted to drama these two characters are, with all their problems stemming from their strange decisions.

The sex itself was vague and unsatisfying. There was only one instance of penetrative sex in the whole book, and it was the awkward breaking of ones virginity. This single instance of sex led to pregnancy. All of the sexual tension brought on in the book had a lot to do with breast manipulation, which I found stiff, and just plain not sexy.

There was a wedding involved, but it didn’t take on the satisfying characteristics that you normally get out of romance novels. It was like a lame wedding I could put together last minute, not the fantasy feeding dream that  we read about to have in our lives when we can never attain them.

The most glamorous part of the book was their trip to Jamaica. They were rich enough to afford two impromptu return tickets home after one day. That is definitely a luxury I could not afford. When I go on vacation, I have to stick to my itinerary. I am that poor.

The lack of character development was disappointing, but not distracting. I could have known more about tiffany’s motivations, and what part of her selfish pathos might have to do with her dead mother. They mentioned something about King’s past in the beginning, something about how his mother brutally took advantage of or killed his father to explain why he wanted to remain a lifelong bachelor. Unfortunately, this potentially interesting character tidbit was not addressed again when he decided that he actually did want to get married. If I met a person like that in real life, I would be completely put off by how much introspection said person lacks. Sure, the book isn’t about King and his pathos, but helping explain his worldview is what makes me care about what happens to him.

The story arc disappointed me because they decided to bring up huge drama in the last 3 pages. Maybe it wasn’t that huge to the author, but rather just a last string to tie up, but it felt like they dropped a bomb and decided not to explore it. The book ended abruptly after a major life decision was made, and it got all tied up in a neat little bow.

I usually feel like reading is the act of getting to know someone you never met. While I can’t assume that the author bared her soul with this work, I can say that I feel like I met her. She told me a story. I explored the depths of her mind and found not much to speak of. Maybe that is too harsh. Maybe she just didn’t do a very good job.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides

I picked up the marriage plot because I greatly enjoyed Middlesex and heard that The Marriage Plot was a little lighter, perfect for a relaxing spa day.

The three main characters are senior Liberal Arts undergraduate students at Brown University.  Madeleine is a notably beautiful literature major hoping to publish her Victorian writing analysis. Her main beau, Leonard, started as a tall handsome smarter-than-thou philosophy student then spiraled tragically into poorly medicated manic depression.  The completion of the love triangle is Mitchell, who does his job poorly and mostly pines from afar. Very far. He pines from Paris, London, and then from Calcutta.

I feel like the love triangle line wasn’t as love-triangley as the book flap makes it out to be. Sure, there is a third person in the love story, but Mitchell doesn’t make much of an impact on Madeleine’s decision making, and she never really reciprocates his love at all. The thing that comes closest to making this trio a love triangle is one awkwardly poignant description of Leonard’s single sexual fantasy of Mitchell and Madeleine together. I hope that didn’t sound weird, that accepting inclusion of the most banal and disgusting aspect of our lives is what makes Jeffery Eugenides an excellent author.

The heft of the book comes from long sprawling dialogues that give me an idea what it must be like to be an introspective liberal arts student in college. They talk about things like Nietzsche and finding yourself. These are things I could not personally identify with. They spoke about philosophy like you weren’t anyone until you had an existential crisis. It was fun to play along, to be apart of that conversation. It made the characters people I didn’t know, instead of cardboard cutouts representing myself.

(spoilers)

The book takes a turn after Leonard and Madeleine get married. It was a wedding in a book that was completely unsatisfying. It happened without any description what so ever. The scenes that took place on the honeymoon were downright strange. These scenes were not charming, although they very well could have been. Sure, Leonard was getting more and more insane as time went on. I felt like the most manic he sounded was during the taffy shop incident, and didn’t have to be pronounced during the count Dracula casino incident.

(end spoilers)

Of the three protagonists, Madeleine was the least fleshed out. At one point she was described as an upper west side looking woman, and that felt like a surprise. At that point, I had no idea what she looked like. People would describe her as sexy, pretty, and composed, but nothing more was ever said. She is also described as very upper middle class. Her father is described as the president of a very small college, and inexplicably pays for everything. Madeleine seems to get everything she ever wants without so much as a thank you.  She doesn’t act like she deserves it, recognizes her priveledge, or even acknowledges its there. She just is, and things just come to her. Perhaps Madeleine is simply not decisive, aware,  and confused about her future, but I don’t think so. I think this the weakest part of the book. Madeleine was poorly drawn. In retrospect, The Virgin Suicides was about young men observing the strange habits of young women. Perhaps, Eugenides shouldn’t be remembered as the man that draws interesting young female characters, but rather, has always tried his best to observe them.

While Madeleine was poorly drawn, Leonard and Mitchell were very interesting. I loved hearing about Mitchell finding his religion. I thought he responded to situations in interesting and insightful ways. The scene in Calcutta with the agronomist was especially memorable. His embarrassing moment in Greece when he tried to speak in tongues was also interesting. It was one of those moments that happens to everyone, but are rarely shared. He took a leap of faith, and it didn’t pan out.

My favorite moment with Leonard was the moment he kissed the taffy girl. It was so bizarre, yet, you didn’t realize he was crazy until that moment. That moment shed new light on all his activities that day. Those moments are amazing. Its like how at the end of The Descent when you realize that she killed her friends.  

The thing that put me off the most about this book was the upper middle class white privilege every character except Leonard possessed. I read a review before I started reading that said that this book was Eugenides attempt at capturing the essence what it meant to be a young American. When I found out that he meant rich white kids in college, I was heavily put off. The characters were making choices they had the luxury to make. They could think of things like religion, love, and health because they didn’t have to think about money and self sufficiency. Is that how everyone else grew up? Because I didn’t. It’s a nitpicky thing, and it doesn’t put me off from the overall experience.

I highly recommend this book. It was a good read, and I enjoyed every page.